Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives

by Rena Sanderson (Editor)

In 1918 , a one-month stint with the American Red Cross ambulance corps at the Italian front marked the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s fascination with Italy―a place second only to Upper Michigan in stimulating his lifelong passion for geography and local expertise. Hemingway’s Italy offers a thorough reassessment of Italy’s importance in the author’s life and work during World War I and the 1920s, when he emerged as a promising young writer, and during his maturity in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

This collection of eighteen essays presents a broad view of Hemingway’s personal and literary response to Italy. The contributors, some of the most distinguished Hemingway scholars, incorporate new biographical and historical information as well as critical approaches ranging from formalist and structuralist theory to cultural and interdisciplinary explorations.

Included are discussions of Italy’s psychological functioning in Hemingway’s life, the author’s correspondence with his father during the writing of A Farewell to Arms, his stylistic experimentation and characterization in that novel, his juxtaposition of the themes of love and war, and his take on Fascism in both his fiction and journalistic work. In addition, the essayists explore relevant contexts of period and place―such as the rise of Fascism, ethnic attitudes, and the cultural currents between Italy and the United States.

A landmark study, Hemingway’s Italy brings long-overdue attention to this great writer’s international role as cultural ambassador.

Contributors : Rena Sanderson, Nancy R. Comley, Kim Moreland, Steven Florczyk, Kirk Curnutt, Lawrence H. Martin, John Robert Bittner, Jeffrey A. Schwarz, J. Gerald Kennedy, H. R. Stoneback, Beverly Taylor, Ellen Andrews Knodt, Linda Wagner-Martin, Robert E. Fleming, Miriam B. Mandel, Joseph M. Flora, Margaret O’Shaughnessey, Stephen L. Tanner, Vita Fortunati

272 pages, Hardcover

First published February 21, 2006

Reviews

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hemingway's Italy edited by Rena Sanderson

If you are a Hemingway aficionado chances are you have already come upon many of the ideas in this book of literary criticism.. There are a few new tidbits that are worthwhile. It is the sort of book, a series of erudite and scholarly essays, that one would read if completing a course or term paper much like I remember in my university days of reading articles in Queen's Quarterly.

The great focus is on his visits to Italy during and after the war and how Italy figures in his Nick Adams short stories and his novels particularly Farewell to Arms, set in WWII Italy.

Comley quotes Hemingway - " they say everyone loves Italy once and that it is well to go through it young." Italy was his "first European romance. After all, Italy was the site of his first war, first wound, first love affair."(41)

Stoneback writes of the intertextuality or source of Alessandro Manzoni's The Bethrothed as a source and parallels the two novels from with their echoes from shared settings in Milan and the Lake country; invading armies and chaotic retreats; lovers separated by war; a priest who counsels about love and sacrifice.

Taylor writes of courtly literature elevating love to the state of religion and the beloved to Madonna; the woman as pure and unattainable with the courtly ideal of love as a religion and quotes Catherine saying "you're my religion".

There are four very long essays and an extensive bibliography. Heavy reading.