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The Great Gatsby was the classic work of Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald was the typical representative of American “Lost Generation”, which endowed the novel with more research value. Past scholars never stopped the studies on him and his works from various perspectives, some from the theme of the novel, some from the character analysis, and some from the narrative techniques, etc. The following part will review the studies of The Great Gatsby both at home and abroad.
After the 20 years when The Great Gatsby was published, just when the new China was founded, China was in great poverty and backwardness, and the war ceaseless. Chinese men and women with high ideals in the circle of literature and art were more concerned with the people’s sufferings and the fate and the future of the nation. The theme and content of The Great Gatsby were not suitable for China’s national conditions in this stage. The novel was doomed to be neglected in China. From the time when the new China was founded to the end of the cultural revolution, the severe mental slavery led to the downturns of foreign literature researches. The contents of the translation were very limited, and scholars paid more attention to the works revealing the disadvantages of the capitalist system. If The Great Gatsby was introduced into China during this period, it could be only criticized. There was an example which could support this point: in the early 1950s, professor Wu Ningkun inadvertently lent the English version The Great Gatsby that he took from America to his students, then he was severely criticized as “decaying the new China youth” for nearly 30 years. The first version of The Great Gatsby in the mainland was translated by by professor Wu Zhengkun in 1982, and it is also the translation that we see today. Since then, various version appeared in succession and the translators with whom people were familiar were Yao Naiqiang and Jia Wenhao, etc. If searching on the websites of the national library of China, people could find a total of 62 different versions of translation.
As for the academic studies on The Great Gatsby, until to the late 70s, some people with breadth of vision in Chinese academic circles began to introduced and studied objectively and fairly some foreign writers and their works. In 1978, The Brief History of American Literature written by Shi Xianrong and Zhu Hong affirmed for the first time the literary status of The Great Gatsby; Then the professor Dong Hengzuan, as the editor of The Brief History of American Literature, analyzed the artistic characteristics of The Great Gatsby in his The Essence of Art Is Creation, which provided a clear and specific direction for the later researches. Throughput the 30 years after the cultural revolution, the researches about The Great Gatsby recorded in Chinese CNKI were more than 1227 articles. There were few articles published in the last century, and only single-digit articles published each year. But since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of papers soared, and particularly after the year of 2008, the studies of The Great Gatsby welcomed a spurting development, and the number of papers every year were more than 100 articles. In 2013 the number reached a peak of 370. The following is going to classify some of the important research directions and specific views.