Hemingway Review Blog

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  In this installment, he looks at books related to Prohibition.

The Spring 2016 issue celebrates the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Hemingway Review.  We acknowledge this milestone with a special “anniversary features” section, which includes an interview with the founding editor of the Review, Charles M. “Tod” Oliver, and a creative piece by Kirk Curnutt that imagines how Hemingway felt on his thirty-fifth birthday through a series of imaginary letters to friends and family.  Hemingway, for the first time since I am  editor , graces the cover.  In the image, he is, of course, thirty-five and looks out at us confidently from the deck of his recently acquired boat, Pilar.

Ron Berman writes about "Books in the Background" of Hemingway scholarship in this new series of posts for the Hemingway Review blog.  He will tackle all kinds of books that contribute to richer understanding of the context in which Hemingway lived and wrote.  In this installment, he looks at books related to The Great War.

Greg Forter’s insightful chapter on The Sun Also Rises, in his book Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism, employs René Girard’s conception of sacrificial violence to suggest that bullfighting in the novel becomes “Hemingway’s fantasmatic … way of imagining a society that knows how to displace, ritualize, and thereby regulate its own violence, rather than wreaking it devastatingly on the bodies of its members” (80). As Spain sat out the World War, one might reasonably see the bullfight as prophylactic—until Spanish society’s internal violence erupted with a vengeance in the civil war of the 1930s.