Hemingway: A Typical Doughboy
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Description
Ernest Hemingways early adulthood (19171929) was marked by his work as a journalist, wartime service, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, artistic struggle, and spectacular success. In War + Ink, veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars, alongside experts in related fields, present pathbreaking research that provides important insights into this period of Hemingways life. Comprised of sixteen elegantly written essays, War + Ink revisits Hemingways formative experiences as a cub reporter in Kansas City. It establishes a fresh set of contexts for his Italian adventure in 1918 and his novels and short stories of the 1920s, offers some provocative reflections on his fiction and the issue of truth-telling in war literature, and reexamines his later career in terms of themes, issues, or places tied to his early life. The essays vary in methodology, theoretical assumptions, and scope; what they share is an eagerness to questionand to look beyondtruisms that have long prevailed in Hemingway scholarship. Highlights include historian Jennifer Keenes persuasive analysis of Hemingway as a typical doughboy, Ellen Andrew Knodts unearthing of Hemingwayesque language spread throughout the correspondence penned by his World War I contemporaries, Susan Beegels account of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and its previously unrecognized impact on the young Hemingway, Jennifer Haytocks adroit analysis of destructive spectatorship in The Sun Also Rises , Mark Cirinos groundbreaking discussion of the instantaneous life review experienced by Hemingways dying characters (an intrusion of the speculative and the fantastic into fiction better known for its hard surfaces and harsh truths), and Matthew Nickels detailed interpretation of the significance of Kansas City in Across the River and Into the Trees . A trio of scholarsCelia Kingsbury, William Blazek, and Daryl Palmerfocus on Soldiers Home, offering three very different readings of this quintessential narrative of an American soldiers homecoming. Finally, Dan Clayton and Thomas G. Bowie reexamine Hemingways war stories in light of those told by todays veterans. War + Ink offers a cross section of todays Hemingway scholarship at its bestand reintroduces us to a young Hemingway we only thought we knew.
ISBN
978-1-60635-175-8
Publication Date
2014
Publisher
Kent State University Press
City
Kent, OH
Keywords
Doughboy, Ernest Hemmingway, Childhood, Wartime, World War I
Disciplines
American Studies | Literature in English, North America | Military and Veterans Studies | United States History
Recommended Citation
Keene, Jennifer. "Hemingway: A Typical Doughboy." In War Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings, edited by Steve Paul, Gail D. Sinclair, and Steven Trout, 53-71. Ohio: Kent State UP, 2014.
Copyright
Kent State University Press
Comments
In Steve Paul, Gail D. Sinclair, and Steven Trout (Ed.), War Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Early Life and Writings. Dr. Keene's chapter begins on page 53.