Gatsby's Oxford: Scott, Zelda, and the Jazz Age Invasion of Britain, 1904–1929 by Christopher A. Snyder (review)

What does Oxford mean to Americans? This, the question Christopher A. Snyder attempts to answer in his new book, Gatsby's Oxford, reminds me of a recurrent episode in the freshman composition class I used to teach. Once every semester I would bring to class a big box of books, which my students would use to compile practice bibliographies. The box contained several Oxford World's Classics. The title page of each listed two cities as places of publication: Oxford and New York. Inevitably, several students would identify the book's place of publication as "Oxford, NY." They obviously assumed Oxford was a town located somewhere in upstate New York. What does Oxford mean to Americans? Nothing, if my students are any indication.

Snyder never actually asks the question he attempts to answer, but I have formulated the question as such to help explain his book. The ostensible purpose of Gatsby's Oxford is to gloss what F. Scott Fitzgerald meant when he had his eponymous hero briefly attend Oxford University after World War I. Snyder hardly needed a whole book to explain Gatsby's brief time at Oxford. One long footnote in an annotated edition of The Great Gatsby would be sufficient. Topping out at over three-hundred pages, Snyder's study goes far beyond his ostensible subject. Gatsby's Oxford might more accurately be titled, "A History of Oxford University from Percy Shelley to Evelyn Waugh."

Gatsby's Oxford gets off to a slow start. Two pages into his preface Snyder admits that he is a New Historicist, identifying himself with a critical approach to American literature that emerged in the 1980s. Snyder's admission seems strange—for at least two reasons. For one, the explicit identification of a critical approach seems inappropriate in a book for general readers published by Pegasus Books, a trade press. For another, the term "New Historicism" is passé, not because so few people do New Historicism but, paradoxically, because so many do. New Historicism has been so successful that it is now the dominant critical approach to American literature, so dominant that most current criticism of American literature is New Historicist without saying so. Overall, Snyder's preface adds little to the book as a whole. It is especially unnecessary because chapter one constitutes the book's introduction. I recommend skipping the preface altogether and going straight to the first chapter.

The first part of chapter one recaps the references to Oxford University in The Great Gatsby. Even for those of us who count Fitzgerald's masterpiece among the top ten novels in American literature, it is good to be reminded of Oxford's significance to the book. Snyder quotes too much for my taste, but his numerous long quotations do reinforce the importance of understanding Jay Gatsby's status as an "Oxford man." To help reveal what Oxford symbolizes in The Great Gatsby, Snyder recalls the Oxford references in Fitzgerald's other fiction in the second part of chapter one, providing another useful survey. Snyder should have quit while he was ahead. The third part of chapter one is a review of secondary scholarship, which is much too dissertationy.

By chapter two, subtitled "Oxford from Percy Shelley to Oscar Wilde," Snyder is already stretching the bounds of his ostensible topic, going back in Oxford's history a century before Gatsby arrived. For those of us with a fair knowledge of British educational history, this chapter is unnecessary, but for many readers, it will supply some curious background information, though its relevance to The Great Gatsby is questionable. Sometimes while reading chapter two, I almost forgot I was reading a book about Fitzgerald. Every once in a while Snyder interjects a modal phrase—"Fitzgerald would have known…"—in an effort to make the chapter relevant. Though Snyder provides much historical background about Oxford University, in some cases he...