Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny confronts the entrenched mystique surrounding the hard drinker, bullfighter, and creator of characters steeled by their own code. Spilka stresses Hemingway's lifelong dependence on and secret identification with women, and in doing so shatters the myths of male bonding and heroic lives of "men without women." He develops the biographical, literary, and cultural implications of Hemingway's lifelong quarrel with androgyny to reveal a more psychologically complex man and writer than the mystique has allowed.

Presents a brief biography of Ernest Hemingway, extracts of major critical essays, plot summaries, and an index of themes and ideas.

Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny is at once a model of literary interpretation and a psycho-critical reading of Hemingway’s life and art. This book is a provocative and theoretically sophisticated inquiry into the traumatic origins of the creative impulse and the dynamics of identity formation in Hemingway. Building on a body of wound-theory scholarship, the book seeks to reconcile the tensions between opposing Hemingway camps, while moving beyond these rivalries into a broader analysis of the relationship between trauma, identity formation and art in Hemingway.

Presents a collection of writings exploring the Nick Adams character who appears in many short stories written by Ernest Hemingway.

A Study Guide for Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Demonstrates in painstaking detail and with reference to stunning new archival evidence how fetishism was crucial to the construction and negotiation of identity and gender in Hemingway's life and fiction.

A study of surprising similarities in their lives and works “adds an important element to the existing discussion” of two twentieth-century literary icons (Studies in American Humor). In this original comparative study of Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway, Lawrence R. Broer maps the striking intersections of biography and artistry in works by both writers, and compares the ways they blend life and art. Broer views Hemingway as the “secret sharer” of Vonnegut’s literary imagination and argues that the two writers—traditionally considered as adversaries because of Vonnegut’s rejection of Hemingway’s emblematic hypermasculinism—inevitably address similar deterministic wounds in their fiction: childhood traumas, family insanity, deforming wartime experiences, and depression. Rooting his discussion in these psychological commonalities, Broer traces their personal and artistic paths by pairing sets of works and protagonists in ways that show the two writers not only addressing similar concerns, but developing a response that in the end establishes an underlying kinship when it comes to the fate of the American hero of the twentieth century. Hemingway provided frequent fodder for Vonnegut, inspiring a cadre of characters who celebrate war and death. In his sardonic response to this vision of a Hemingwayesque world, Vonnegut espoused kindness and restraint as moral imperatives against the more violent yearnings of human nature, which Hemingway in turn embraced as stoic, virile, and heroic. Though their paths were radically different, Broer finds in both an overarching obsession with the scars of war as chief adversary in a personal quest for understanding and wholeness. He locates in each writer’s canon moments of spiritual awaking leading to literary evolution—if not outright reinvention. In their later works Broer detects an increasing recognition of redemptive feminine aspects in themselves and their protagonists, pulling against the destructively tragic fatalism that otherwise dominates their worldviews. Broer sees Vonnegut and Hemingway as fundamentally at war—with themselves, with one another’s artistic visions, and with the idea of war itself. Against this onslaught, he asserts, they wrote as a mode of therapy and achieved literary greatness through combative opposition to the shadows that loomed so large around them.

Traces Hemingway's critical fortunes over the ninety years of his prominence, telling us something about what we value in literature and why scholarly reputations rise and fall. Hemingway burst on the literary scene in the 1920s with spare, penetrating short stories and brilliant novels. Soon he was held as a standard for modern writers. Meanwhile, he used his celebrity to create a persona like the stoic, macho heroes of his fiction. After a decline during the 1930s and 1940s, he came roaring back with The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize. While his popularity waxed and waned during his lifetime, Hemingway's reputation among scholars remained strong as long as traditional scholarship dominated. New approaches beginning in the 1960s brought a sea change, however, finding grave fault with his work and making him a figure ripe for vilification. Yet during this time scholarship on him continued to appear. His works still sell well, and several are staples on high-school and college syllabi. A new scholarly edition of his letters is drawing prominent attention, and there is a resurgence in scholarly attention to - and approbation for - his work. Tracing Hemingway's critical fortunes tells us something about what we value in literature and why reputations rise and fall as scholars find new ways to examine and interpret creative work. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, Updike, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.

Whether revered for his masculinity, condemned as an icon of machismo, or perceived as possessing complex androgynous characteristics, Ernest Hemingway is acknowledged to be one of the most important twentieth-century American novelists. For Debra A. Moddelmog, the intense debate about the nature of his identity reveals how critics' desires give shape to an author's many guises. In her provocative book, Moddelmog interrogates Hemingway's persona and work to show how our perception of the writer is influenced by society's views on knowledge, power, and sexuality. She believes that recent attempts to reinvent Hemingway as man and as artist have been circumscribed by their authors' investment in heterosexist ideology; she seeks instead to situate Hemingway's sexual identity in the interface between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Moddelmog looks at how sexual orientation, gender, race, nationality, able-bodiedness—and the intersections of these elements—contribute to the formation of desire. Ultimately, she makes a far-reaching and suggestive argument about multiculturalism and the canons of American letters, asserting that those who teach literature must be aware of the politics and ethics of the authorial constructions they promote.

In this provocative book, Thomas Strychacz pursues an entirely new approach to the question of masculinity in Ernest Hemingway's work. He begins with a close reading of Hemingway's famous story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and continues through the story cycle In Our Time; the short story "The Undefeated"; the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea; and the nonfiction books Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. Challenging the traditional wisdom that Hemingway fashions a quintessentially masculine style and promotes an ideal of stoic, independent manhood, Strychacz argues that Hemingway's fiction poses masculinity as a theatrical performance. Masculinity emerges from a series of complex negotiations between male characters, readers, and cultural codes of manhood. Hemingway's "masculine" style should be seen as deeply rhetorical, inviting the audience to think of masculinity as a contention to be debated rather than a fact that demands acquiescence. Drawing on feminism, gender studies, and the New Men's Studies, this book casts brilliant interpretive light on Hemingway's artistry. It contributes significantly to the larger cultural discussions about the nature of masculinity while offering an analysis and critique of masculinity in Hemingway's work that greatly extends recent scholarly debates about "masculine modernism." It raises the compelling question, What is "modernism" if "masculinity" is exposed as more problematic and elusive than previously suspected?