Page | 10 Anglisticum Journal (IJLLIS), Volume: 8 | Issue: 2 | February 2019  e-ISSN: 1857-8187  p-ISSN: 1857-8179 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2582119 Research Article Rafik Laceb University Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria. This research explores the displacement of romance by tragedy in Scott Fitzgerald‟s novel The Great Gatsby. Taking its theoretical bearings from the archetypal approach developed by Northrop Frye, supplemented by insights borrowed from Georg Lukacs, Aristotle, Hegel and many other scholars, the research aims to show how the romantic hero lands in a tragic situation because of his belief in ideals that are no longer viable in the consumerist American society of the 1920s. Among other arguments, it also seeks to illustrate how The Great Gatsby plays a thematic and stylistic variation on romance such as Shakespeare‟s Midsummer Nights‟ Dream and tragedy as elaborated around the House of the Atreus by Greek playwrights like Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. Introduction n his analysis of Fitzgerald‟s The Great Gatsby (1994, All the in-text citations are to this edition.), Trilling (1950) has come to the conclusion that the novel is a principally a love story gone wrong in the American manner, in other words a tragic romance. “From Proust we learn about a love that is destructive by a kind of corrosiveness… From Fitzgerald‟s The Great Gatsby and Tender is the night we learn about love … that is destructive by reason of its very tenderness, (p.232)” Trilling wrote. Trilling is also one of the critics who have contributed to the rehabilitation of Fitzgerald as novelist by comparing him to the originators of the novel such as Cervantes. This comparison indirectly qualifies the novel as a comedy of manners of the same standards as Cervantes‟ Don Quixote. So in nearly the same breath, Trilling has categorized the novel as a tragedy, a romance, a comedy, and irony or satire. Unless the archetypal approach, and most notably the concept of “displacement” is brought to bear on Trilling‟s critique of Fitzgerald‟s novel, his statements might sound as confused and confusing though he is to the point. Indeed, The Great Gatsby deploys all these types of mythos in the chapters of the novel, but every one of them prevails at particular moments of the overall plot structure before being displaced by another type of mythos, ranging from comedy to tragedy with romance and irony standing in-between. Part of the complexity of The Great Gatsby, an apparently simple and straightforward novel to readers interested in love stories gone wrong, comes from the novel‟s sophisticated and intricate interweaving of a wide variety of mythos. This plot complexity of the novel has attracted the attention of a huge number of critics in their attempt to assign it to a particular category of fiction. In conferences such as the ones organized by the Scott Fitzgerald Society over these last few years, The Great Gatsby has maintained its proud place amongst all the works written by Fitzgerald in spite of its misleading simplicity and slenderness. In the research that follows, I F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S THE GREAT GATSBY AN ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL AS A TRAGIC ROMANCE Literature Keywords: The Great Gatsby, Displacement, Romance, Tragedy, Shakespeare, Greek Tragedy. I Abstract brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Anglisticum - Journal of the Association for Anglo-American Studies, Macedonia