F Scott. Fitzgerald’s Post-decadent Novel “This Side of Paradise”
This Side of Paradise is usually understood in terms of its present and future (the Jazz Age / Lost Generation) but it is also illuminating to look at it in terms of its past. The voluminous reading lists comprising Amory Blaine’s literary education show us this book’s literary background in detail, and authors of the decadent tradition are found on these lists from the very beginning. Along with his Midwestern Catholicism, it is the decadence he inherits from his mother that gives Amory a feeling of otherness that plagues him throughout the book.
Epigrues 