“Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art”: This maxim from Fitzgerald’s notebooks squares with his ambition to be among the greatest American writers of his time. Fitzgerald’s evolving sense of who his era’s giant writers were – through the judgments of what he called “the cultural world” – led him by the time he wrote The Great Gatsby and just after to align his work with an elite, international modernism. But as this chapter demonstrates, Fitzgerald’s fiction remained relatively conventional in the context of revolutionary modernism, in good part because of his care for ordinary readers. And the high regard he professed for writers like Joyce, Stein, and Conrad did not preclude his generous interest in more ordinary contemporaries. His wide, eclectic reading of his contemporaries reveals the actual catholicity and conventionality of his literary tastes. The argument suggests that while Fitzgerald’s reputation was bolstered by his positioning himself on the side of the anti-commercial and avant-garde values of the modernist literary field, it was his professional commitment to good, affective writing that proved most crucial to his winning what he most coveted: literary immortality.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on “public memory.” Chapter 3 focuses on various patterns of literary memory in the 1980s and later and shows that the pattern of “good people but the bad event” became dominant. The variations and trend in the literary memory can be explained by the interplay of several factors: the dominant doxa of realism and unusual dynamics in the literary field in the 1980s, major authors’ habitus, the lower-class position of the returning zhiqing, and the state’s political use of the Maoist past.

This chapter covers Ibsen’s years in Rome (1864–8), Dresden (1868–75) and Munich (1875–80). Often presented as a voluntary ‘exile’, the move to Rome followed a general pattern of Norwegian authors and artists going abroad for training and studies. Ibsen’s prolonged stay had to do with his need to keep a distance from political pressures and conflicts in a small and transparent society. When he moved abroad, he also left the theatre as the institutional setting for his writings and transferred to the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Ibsen experienced his Scandinavian breakthrough in the book market with the verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). Once again writing a play for performance, The League of Youth (1869), he ended up giving priority to the book. Throughout the rest of his career, Ibsen’s plays were issued as books before they were performed. The League of Youth became Ibsen’s breakthrough in the Scandinavian theatre, while at the same time initiating a rupture with the liberals in Norway. Ibsen’s conservatism became more outspoken throughout the 1870s, and, by the end of the decade, Ibsen had alienated himself from the emerging ‘Literary Left’, headed by Georg Brandes and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Pillars of the Community (1877), however, seemed to signal a cautious reorientation.