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This chapter addresses one of Mailer’s most notable literary influences, Ernest Hemingway. Mailer wrestled with the looming influence of Hemingway to such an extent that the relationship merits its own focused study. When it was first published, The Naked and the Dead invited immediate comparisons to Hemingway, which had much to do with the two authors similar thematic concerns. For years, Mailer alternately fought against and embraced these comparisons, wrestling with Hemingway’s influence, writing about him on more than one occasion (in pieces such as 1956’s “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President” and 1963’s “Punching Papa” among others), and writing an unanswered letter to him as well.
“Wharton and the Romance Plot” describes the relationship among three of Wharton’s novels that are heavily indebted to romance conventions – The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer. The failure of each narrative to reach the happy ending of a wished-for marriage provides readers with one means of questioning the actions of each pair of carefully drawn characters: is the absence of a fairy-tale ending the fault of Lily or Selden? Anna or George? Charity or Lucius? As Wharton changes the conventions of romance, she asks the reader to do a different kind of reading, a more socially based critique, one dependent on expectations by gender. Literary history seems to have prejudiced readers against Wharton’s early women characters, yet Henry James saw all too clearly how noble Anna Leathe was. With Lily Bart dead, and Charity Royall summarily wed, the fact that Anna wins the lover she desires breaks the often-cliched romance plot in her favor.
Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of the Spanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern.Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon.Miriam B. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.
The Sun Also Rises (1926) was Hemingway's first novel and is widely considered to be the most important of his longer works of fiction. Written in an accessible style by prominent scholars, this collection of essays provides helpful and valuable insight for general readers and Hemingway specialists alike. Each essay is devoted to a major aspect of the novel: Hemingway's use of humor, the literary and historical context of the book, the atypically prevalent character of Brett Ashley, and topical approaches to issues of sexuality in the novel.
Go Down, Moses (1942) came to fruition during the Second World War, was written during one of Faulkner's most traumatic periods, and has fallen to critical neglect amid the vast scholarship on the great Southern writer. In part, this collection aims to tilt the balance, forcing the reader beyond critical commonplaces through asking challenging questions. The five essays assembled here explore the tensions of race and gender apparent throughout the novel. Judith Sensibar approaches the work through Faulkner's relationship with Caroline Barr, the black woman who was his primary caretaker in life; Judith Wittenberg offers an ecological reading; John T. Matthews redefines the novel as a 'Southern' experience; Minrose Gwin focuses on the spaces in the text occupied by black women characters; and Thadious M. Davis charts further complications of the black-white relationships that lie at the heart of the novel.
To consider the effect of Sylvia Plath's writing on today's poetry scene is to marvel at the endurance of her poems. Nearly thirty years ago, Denise Levertov remarked that a poet need write only a few remarkable poems to be remembered. It goes almost without saying that Plath wrote more than several such poems. More to the point is the fact that the poems of Plath's Ariel and, in retrospect, The Colossus, had the power to transform the direction of American - and to some extent, British - poetics. Here in the twenty-first century, the results of the impact of Plath's work are as pervasive as the influence of Ernest Hemingway's terse yet open prose. These effects are so commonplace that readers today no longer comment that contemporary fiction owes a great deal to Hemingway, the classic modernist. Nor do they align much of contemporary poetry with the influence of Plath's Ariel in 1965 and, even more dramatically, with her Collected Poems in 1981.
Changes in stylistic expression, in each case, marked more than shifts in the techniques of writing. Both Hemingway and Plath thrust deep into their inner lives to find what was worthy of their expression. Impolitic as it was for Hemingway to reveal the painful divergence of his Oak Park, Illinois, parents - which he did so sharply in such In Our Time stories as 'Indian Camp', 'The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife', and 'Cat in the Rain', even more dangerous to her family and her psyche was the insistent anger of Plath's 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy' and 'Medusa'. To voice these strident emotions was to unearth new ways of writing. Neither Hemingway nor Plath had earlier models to follow.