This research explores the interlocked notions of friendship, community, gift, and commodity culture in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It seeks to demonstrate that Fitzgerald’s ethical vision of friendship, community, the Bad, and the Good are deeply shaped by Aristotle’s works The Nicomachean Ethics, The Politics, and The Metaphysics. The extent to which Aristotle has shaped the form and contents of The Great Gatsby, a novel rightly described as a classic of its genre and how far the contentious aspect of its gendered and orientalized characterization can be traced to Fitzgerald’s dialogic relation with the Greek philosopher are among certain questions that this research addresses. The approach to the issue and the related questions stated above is eclectic. It draws its paradigms, partly from Bakhtin’s dialogical theory, partly from economic and cultural anthropology, and partly from postcolonial, historical theory of the type elaborated by Said and Fanon.
This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
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