In the world of reading and analyzing literature, there is more than one way to read it and interpret it. Literary theories provide many different ways of exploring, reading and tackling a literary text. And a literary text might offer an insightful idea about which literary theory one should use while approaching that literary text itself. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is one of his significant novels in his career, and while reading it one can get a sense of what was the world like in the time of Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby, mirrors the time of the American Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby, is almost and always thought of as the true and close reflection of that time in American history. George Santayana’s line, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (284), implies that everyone should learn from the past and take a deep look into the history of the world. One of the ways of learning about history is through the close reading of literature, and …show more content…
This means that historical documents are read with fictional novels in mind. By doing so, one could explain the historical context within a novel to further understand the text. (Meyer 592). This paper will tackle the text of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, through the lens of New Historicism theory in order to understand the historical and cultural aspects of the novel. To fully understand The Great Gatsby, one must understand the historical and cultural context in which the novel was written in. According to New Historicism, literary texts are influenced by the social and historical circumstances in which they were produced and. So, this paper will explore some of the historical and cultural aspects found in The Great Gatsby, that was inspired by the time in which the text was written