Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook

by Linda Wagner-Martin (Editor)

Still the most popular of Hemingway's books, The Sun also Rises captures the quintessential romance of the expatriate Americans and Britons in Paris after World War I. The text provides a way for discussions of war, sexuality, personal angst, and national identity to be linked inextricably with the stylistic traits of modern writing. This Casebook, edited by one of Hemingway's most eminent scholars, presents the best critical essays on the novel to be published in the last half century. These essays address topics as diverse as sexuality, religion, alcoholism, gender, Spanish culture, economics, and humor. The volume also includes an interview with Hemingway conducted by George Plimpton.

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Linda Wagner-Martin is the Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emerita at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Over a teaching career spanning 53 years, she taught at Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and UNC, while authoring and editing more than 55 books. Her work includes biographies of major literary figures such as Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, along with studies like A History of American Literature from 1950 to the Present and The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism. After retiring in 2011, she continued publishing extensively. Wagner-Martin’s contributions have earned her prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Service to American Literature, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute. She holds BA, BS, MA, and PhD degrees from Bowling Green State University, where she graduated magna cum laude with majors in English and minors in American History.

Reviews

[Tom Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a valuable resource for considering The Sun Also Rises from different angles. Provides useful context for the novel's history as well as arguments for its contemporary relevance. The interview with Hemingway himself is of course especially illuminating.

[Mike Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is an excellent, insightful and multi-faceted look at Hemingway's first novel. There are a few essays that overlap in terms of theme, but this is just one example in the compilation, and not the rule for the book.

The Sun Also Rises is a deceptively simple little book that hides right in front of the reader's eye, in plain sight. Through the Casebook, relationships and snippets of dialogue are "lens-ed", taking what is a solid straight-forward read, and casting in a thoroughly three-dimensional form, particularly in terms of attitudes toward gender. Hemingway himself quipped that the book was about "morality", but gender figures in largely in the casebook, revealing a cornucopia of double-meanings in the dialogue and unlocking some of the imagery, looking the past the superficial hedonism of the expatriates.

Also featured is a long, written interview with the cantankerous Hemingway.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for book club. Clearly a text for study, not for enjoyment. Fun to revisit after all these years. Also fun because our son had just returned from Pamplona and had actually run with the bulls--so I had pictures, a red scarf from the event.

[Kirk Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess this is about as good as it gets a little less for affordable Hemingway scholarship. Some of the essays are also in the Norton Critical edition. On the whole the essays are bit better than in Norton. Leftist causes are nice in their way but I wanted more literature

The Simon & Schuster Hemingway Library edition has the excised portions that Hemingway that were cut at the last moment, and also some samples of Hemingway's editing progress, which is maybe more valuable than all the essays here put together

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, published posthumously, is comprised mostly of memories of Paris from around that time. It's not as good as The Sun Also Rises, but it does reach some heights, and if you want to hate Ford Maddox Ford, then add it to your collection

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Just some of the related books I didn't read:

The holy grail appears to be Svoboda's Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises: The Crafting of a Style from 1983, but currrently its lowest used price is $631

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by Lesley MM Blume from 2016 is $12 online and looks promising

Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by HR Stoneback ($35) from 2007 looks excellent and if I had it over I would have chosen it instead of Casebook. Looks like it was the first of a planned Hemingway annotations/etc series that didn't sell well enough to continue because the world is #&*$#

Literary Companion Series - The Sun Also Rises from 2001 is edited by Kelly Wand and can be had for $5. Its essays look to be more predominately literary than Norton's and Casebook's and I would choose it over Casebook for this reason

Teaching Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises from 2004 by Lt Col Peter L Hays can be found for $14 used and runs 403 pages

Male And Female Roles in Ernest Hemingway's the Sun Also Rises (Social Issues in Literature) from 2008 is still in print and costs $32. After the essays on the above, I cannot imagine reading another 219 pages on the subject

Reading 'The Sun Also Rises': Hemingway's Political Unconscious by Marc Baldwin from 1998 is $35 and is 153 pages

The Modern Interpretations Series book from 1999 edited by Harold Bloom, but you can't get it on the cheap ($50) and I don't like Bloom anyway: he was a tiresome overrated bogmonster

There's an even more expensive (so better?)($167) out-of-print The Critical Reception of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (Literary Criticism in Perspective) from 2011.

The Moral World of The Sun Also Rises by Russell Weaver from 2023 is 320 pages of small print and $110

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some great essays in this casebook. I highly recommend it if you're into Hemingway.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely helpful essays and interviews.