HEMINGWAY'S GENDERS

by Nancy R. Comley, Robert Scholes

Ernest Hemingway has long been regarded as a fiercely heterosexual writer who advocated and embodied an exaggerated masculinity. This witty and intelligent book, the first to focus exclusively on gender in Hemingway's writing, presents a new view of the author, demonstrating that issues of gender and sexuality are more complex and subtle in his work than has ever been imagined.

Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes reread the Hemingway Text―his published and unpublished writing and what is known about his life―and show that gender was one of his conscious preoccupations. They explore the anguish and uncertainty beneath the blunt facade of Papa Hemingway; they examine a range of Hemingway's fictional women in such works as The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls and suggest that his best representations of women take on attributes of gender commonly viewed as male; they discuss how lesbianism, sex changes, and miscegenation appear in Hemingway's early and late writing; and they analyze examples of homosexual desire among boys and men in Hemingway's stories of bullfighters and soldiers. Offering new readings of familiar and previously unknown Hemingway texts, this book will change the way this author is read and evaluated.

169 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 1994

About the author

Professor and Chair of the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York. In addition to Fields, she has co-edited The Practice of Writing and Text Book for Bedford/St. Martin's, and is co-author with Robert Scholes of Hemingway's Genders (Yale UP).

She is an established expert, often writing on modernist literature, composition, and Hemingway.