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This daring collaborative effort showcases dialogues between international scholars engaged with the United States from abroad. The writers investigate the analytic methods and choices that label certain talk, images, behaviors, and allusions as "American" and how to read the data on such material. The editors present the essays in pairs that overlap in theme or region. Each author subsequently comments on the other's work. A third scholar or team of scholars from a different discipline or geographic location then provides another level of analysis. Contributors: Andrzej Antoszek, Sophia Balakian, Zsófia Bán, Sabine Bröck, Ian Condry, Kate Delaney, Jane C. Desmond, Virginia R. Dominguez, Ira Dworkin, Richard Ellis, Guillermo Ibarra, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Giorgio Mariani, Ana Mauad, Loes Nas, Edward Schatz, Manar Shorbagy, Kristin Solli, Amy Spellacy, and Michael Titlestad.

    "A stunning piece of
        work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,
        it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal
        companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America
        as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."
       
        -- Roger Rosenblatt
      "An impressive study
        that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall
        context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden
        Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald
      "Citing films, dates,
        places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture,
        the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters
        in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels
        to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,
        photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity
        for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes
        that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."
        -- A. Hirsh, Choice