In 1918 , a one-month stint with the American Red Cross ambulance corps at the Italian front marked the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s fascination with Italy—a place second only to Upper Michigan in stimulating his lifelong passion for geography and local expertise. Hemingway’s Italy offers a thorough reassessment of Italy’s importance in the author’s life and work during World War I and the 1920s, when he emerged as a promising young writer, and during his maturity in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This collection of eighteen essays presents a broad view of Hemingway’s personal and literary response to Italy. The contributors, some of the most distinguished Hemingway scholars, incorporate new biographical and historical information as well as critical approaches ranging from formalist and structuralist theory to cultural and interdisciplinary explorations. Included are discussions of Italy’s psychological functioning in Hemingway’s life, the author’s correspondence with his father during the writing of A Farewell to Arms, his stylistic experimentation and characterization in that novel, his juxtaposition of the themes of love and war, and his take on Fascism in both his fiction and journalistic work. In addition, the essayists explore relevant contexts of period and place—such as the rise of Fascism, ethnic attitudes, and the cultural currents between Italy and the United States. A landmark study, Hemingway’s Italy brings long-overdue attention to this great writer’s international role as cultural ambassador. Contributors : Rena Sanderson, Nancy R. Comley, Kim Moreland, Steven Florczyk, Kirk Curnutt, Lawrence H. Martin, John Robert Bittner, Jeffrey A. Schwarz, J. Gerald Kennedy, H. R. Stoneback, Beverly Taylor, Ellen Andrews Knodt, Linda Wagner-Martin, Robert E. Fleming, Miriam B. Mandel, Joseph M. Flora, Margaret O’Shaughnessey, Stephen L. Tanner, Vita Fortunati

This selection of seventeen essays on the writing of Ernest Hemingway is edited by Robert W. Lewis, the President of the Hemingway Society and Chairman of the Hemingway Foundation. Commentary on Hemingway is now entering new fields with the opening of the enormously rich Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston. Lewis' selection illustrates the pluralism and richness of current research and criticism. He has divided these essays into four groupings which examine Hemingway's women characters, his relations with other writers textual and critical studies and his fiction set in Italy. These scholars bring new insight to the understanding of Hemingway's published and unpublished works and illustrate that Hemingway studies have come of age in our time. These seventeen essays demonstrate the maturity and diversity of Hemingway studies. Built on a considerable body of criticism, they utilize revelations from manuscripts and galleys and reach out to other disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. In the first of four groupings scholars reexamine Hemingway's treatment of women and previous misconceptions of his sexual politics. Linda Patterson Miller begins with a general introduction and reassessment. Roger Stephenson concludes this four essay grouping with a provocative tour de force. The second section focuses on four very different relationships: Hemingway with Bernard Berenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers and critics. The third grouping includes four textual analyses. Ranging from intensely personal to scholarly neutral, they all illustrate the richness of current scholarship. Describing Hemingway's strong attachment to Italy, Lewis reminds his readers that Hemingway's imagination was richly nourished by this country. In the fourth and final grouping five scholars conduct a provocative exploration of Hemingway's Italy.

Ernest Hemingway's artistic powers are generally recognized to have been at their highest in A Farewell to Arms (1929), which has entered the canon of modern literature as one of its masterpieces. Combining austere realism and poetic language to present a powerful argument against war, the novel detailing the tragic affair during World War I between an American lieutenant and a Scottish nurse tells a touching love story at the same time. Long after its publication, A Farewell to Arms continues to be an important work because of the questions it asks about the human condition. What is it like to be adrift; to live with uncertain personal values in a world of shifting values; to be unsure of the differences between good and bad and what should be desired and what actually is desired? In short, how does one learn to live? Hemingway's disillusionment and technical virtuosity, particularly in works like A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, influenced a whole generation of writers. Robert Lewis's exceptionally comprehensive and clear study of A Farewell to Arms is new both in its particular readings and its various emphases. Building upon previous Hemingway scholarship, it concentrates on character and theme rather than plot and style. Structural and stylistic concerns are discussed in the first part of the book, but with reference to their place in the creation of character and elaboration of certain themes. In the remainder of this study, Lewis explores a number of thematic clusters and oppositions in the novel: life and love as a game; sanity versus insanity; and appearance versus essence. Finally, Lewis argues that A Farewell to Arms is, at heart, a novel about language. This wellwritten study should provide students and other readers with a thorough reading of A Farewell to Arms while also contributing to Hemingway scholarship in general.