With an Overview by Paul Smith and a Checklist to Hemingway Criticism, 1975–1990 New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is an all-new sequel to Benson’s highly acclaimed 1975 book, which provided the first comprehensive anthology of criticism of Ernest Hemingway’s masterful short stories. Since that time the availability of Hemingway’s papers, coupled with new critical and theoretical approaches, has enlivened and enlarged the field of American literary studies. This companion volume reflects current scholarship and draws together essays that were either published during the past decade or written for this collection. The contributors interpret a variety of individual stories from a number of different critical points of view—from a Lacanian reading of Hemingway’s “After the Storm” to a semiotic analysis of “A Very Short Story” to an historical-biographical analysis of “Old Man at the Bridge.” In identifying the short story as one of Hemingway’s principal thematic and technical tools, this volume reaffirms a focus on the short story as Hemingway’s best work. An overview essay covers Hemingway criticism published since the last volume, and the bibliographical checklist to Hemingway short fiction criticism, which covers 1975 to mid-1989, has doubled in size. Contributors. Debra A. Moddelmog, Ben Stotzfus, Robert Scholes, Hubert Zapf, Susan F. Beegel, Nina Baym, William Braasch Watson, Kenneth Lynn, Gerry Brenner, Steven K. Hoffman, E. R. Hagemann, Robert W. Lewis, Wayne Kvam, George Monteiro, Scott Donaldson, Bernard Oldsey, Warren Bennett, Kenneth G. Johnston, Richard McCann, Robert P. Weeks, Amberys R. Whittle, Pamela Smiley, Jeffrey Meyers, Robert E. Fleming, David R. Johnson, Howard L. Hannum, Larry Edgerton, William Adair, Alice Hall Petry, Lawrence H. Martin Jr., Paul Smith

Friends and colleagues honor the 30-year career of Appalachian-born literature scholar White with 15 essays. Their goal is to call attention to ideas or connections that demand a reappraisal of conventional attitudes or ingrained responses. Spanning from the middle 19th century to the present, they consider such well known authors as Hawthorne, Cather, and Welty but also some less known ones such as Wallace Stegner, Dunstan Thomas, and neglected Civil War poets. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

How do readers make sense of Hemingway’s short stories? How is it possible that the camera-like quality of his narrative can appeal to our senses and arouse our emotions? How does it capture us? With reserved narrators and protagonists engaged in laconic dialogs, his texts do not seem to say much. This book consciously revisits our responses to the Hemingway story, a belated response to his invitation to discover what lies beneath the surface of his iceberg. What this pioneering critical endeavor seeks to understand is the thinking required in reading Hemingway’s short fiction. It proposes a cognitively informed model of reading which questions the resources of the reader’s imaginative powers. The cognitive demonstrations here are designed to have potentially larger implications for the short story’s general mode of knowing. Drawing from both cognitively oriented poetics and narratology in equal measure, this book explains what structures our interaction with literary texts.

Books studying the presence of Spain in American literature, and the possible influence of Spain and its literature on American authors, are still rare. In 1955 appeared a pioneer work in this field – Stanley T. Williams’ The Spanish Background of American Literature. But that book went no further than W.D. Howells’ Familiar Spanish Travels, published in 1913. The Last Good Land covers most of the twentieth century, including such groups as the Lost Generation and African American writers and exiles. It also considers then recent revolution in Spanish cultural and historical thought introduced by Américo Castro, which several American writers discussed in this volume may be said to have anticipated. Recent studies have expanded on Williams’ volumes, but in the majority of cases these works limit their scope to a single period (the nineteenth century, the Spanish Civil War), a movement (predominantly Romanticism) or authors known for their interest in Spain (Irving, Hemingway). The result is often a lack of continuum, or the exclusion of such authors as Saul Bellow, William Gaddis or Richard Wright. Within American literature itself, The Last Good Land contains revisions of traditional interpretations of certain writers, including Hemingway. The variety of authors treated, both in respect to ethnicity and gender, guarantees a varied and global view of Spanish culture by American writers.

The Influence of the European Culture on Hemingway’s Fiction is an essential companion to all those who study Hemingway. The studydeals with how Hemingway depicts Europe in his fiction, not necessarily from a biographical point of view, as most critical books have dealt with, but how he assimilates to the culture of Europe, how he portrays the different aspects of that culture in food, music, customs, architecture, and literature. This study views Hemingway’s stories and novels through a new lens by applying new critical developments, emergent approaches, and transnational studies to aid in a fuller understanding of Hemingway. Europe for Hemingway was a land of discovery, and one cannot study his major novels without analyzing this passion for these lands. The Europe that Hemingway experienced and recorded in his writing serves as an important element in his fiction, becoming “the other,” an alien culture that was sufficiently different from his American roots. Yet this otherness serves first to fulfill his psychological needs to learn and become one of the initiated through suffering—whether it involves himself or the loss of other people around him.

Philosophy and Literary Modernism probes the relationship of authors with the thought of their time. The authors studied here include Conrad, Eliot, Faulkner, Forster, Hemingway, Hesse, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Williams, and Woolf, among others. Literary modernism engaged with explorations of literary form, language, ways of knowing the world, identity, commitment, chance, truth, and beauty. The book considers how writers participated in the intellectual spirit of their time and with the thought of philosophers like Henri Bergson, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This Companion serves both as an introduction for the interested reader and as a source of the best recent scholarship on the author and his works. In addition to analysing his major texts, the contributors provide insights into Hemingway's relationship with gender history, journalism, fame and the political climate of the 1930s. The essays are framed by an introductory chapter on Hemingway and the costs of fame and an invaluable conclusion providing an overview of Hemingway scholarship from its beginnings to the present. Students will find the selected bibliography a useful guide to future research. Contributors include both distinguished established figures and brilliant newcomers, all chosen with regard to the clarity and readability of their prose.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The first extensive study of Hemingway's relationship to his hometown, Oak Park, Illinois, and the influence its people, places, and underlying values had on his early work."Fresh and insightful essays provide extended and focused discussion of issues central to Hemingway's literary identity". -- Susan Beegel, The Hemingway Review