Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory - 9781606350423

"With this essay collection, Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott have opened another set of fruitful paths into Hemingway's work. History continues to show the richness of the Hemingway oeuvre; the editors' focus on both travel and memory is consistently dynamic. All readers will learn from this collection." Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English, The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

"The wide-ranging essays in this impressive collection provide an important and convincing analysis of Hemingway'consciously crafted aesthetic--the fusion of past experience with artistic creation. Aptly titled, Hemingway and the Geography of Memory moves us further toward understanding this artist's practice of filtering experience through the scrim of fiction." Gail D. Sinclair, coeditor of Key West Hemingway: A Reassessment

Ernest Hemingway's work reverberates with a blend of memory, geography, and lessons of life revealed through the trauma of experience. Michigan, Italy, Spain, Paris, Africa, and the Gulf Stream are some of the most distinctive settings in Hemingway's short fiction, novels, articles, and correspondence. In his fiction, Hemingway revisited these sites, reimagining and transforming them. Travel was the engine of his creative life, as the recurrent contrast between spaces provided him with evidence of his emerging identity as a writer.

The contributors to Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory employ an intriguing range of approaches to Hemingway's work, using the concept of memory as an interpretive tool to enhance understanding of Hemingway's creative process. The essays are divided into four sections---Memory and Composition, Memory and Allusion, Memory and Place, and Memory and Truth---and examine the Garden of Eden, In our Time, The Old Man and the Sea, Green Hills of Africa, Under Kilimanjaro, The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, as well as several of Hemingway's short stories.

Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory is a fascinating volume that will appeal to the Hemingway schlar as well as the general reader.