Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 96) - Softcover

Burwell, Rose Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521565634 ISBN 13: 9780521565639

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Synopsis

When Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961 he left four unfinished works--A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and an untitled work on his travels in Africa. The edited versions that have come down to readers and scholars of Hemingway appear as distinct, disjointed texts that fit oddly into his oeuvre. Through extensive literary detective work Burwell has uncovered substantial evidence that Hemingway in fact designed the three published works as a trilogy, what she terms "his own Portrait of the Artist."

About this title

Book Description

Ernest Hemingway left four unfinished works--A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, The Garden of Eden, and an untitled work on his travels in Africa. This text has uncovered substantial evidence that he in fact designed the three published works as a trilogy, or "his own Portrait of the Artist".

Review

"Arguing persuasively throughout this text, Burwell demonstrates the literary, professional, personal, and chronologically relational nature of the tetralogy. She thoroughly documents every aspect of her analysis, her claims and speculations, revealing a formidable knowledge of Hemingway's life and work, as well as the body of scholarship which surrounds and supports him, sometimes protectively. Making use of materials, letters and manuscripts earlier close to (or ignored by) scholars, she forges links between texts which provide new critical and biographical insights into the man/writer who has compelled--and sometimes repelled--readers throughout the world." Novel

"[T]his is a masterpiece. She now enters the ranks of the important Hemingway scholars. All of them will have to reckon with her book, and they will be citing it and arguing over it for years to come." Robert Scholes, Brown University

"Burwell is at her best in her discussion of A Moveable Feast and the effect Mary Hemingway and the Scribners editors had on the rearrangement of the original manuscript. Few Hemingway scholars will be able to resist reading and commenting on this clearly written, engaging, and controversial work." Thomas K. Meier, American Literature

"...it is a superb work of scholarship, a sensitive and enlightening piece of criticism, and, in an achievement which jarringly alters the accepted cliches of Hemingway studies, it provides the first satisfying answer to question What happened to Hemingway after 1945? Burwell's discussions are solidly grounded on a thorough comprehension of everything we know factually about Hemingway's life..." Earl Rovit, The Sewanee Review

"Rose Marie Burwell's Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels is the superior book....Burwell's book brilliantly offers a unified argument..." Kim Moewland, American Studies International

"Burwell has produced a book that is not only very readable...but is a model of fine scholarship as well: especially impressive is her scholarly detective work. Rose Marie Burwell's excellent book is a significant contribution to Hemingway scholarship. She has also provided a fine rendering of the drama of Hemingway's post-war writing career." Nancy R. Comley, Studies in the Novel

"No one studying this period in Hemingway's life can afford to neglect Rose Marie Burwell's liberating and enlightening contribution." Earl Rovit, The Sewanee Review

"This exemplary study of the texts of the various unfinished narratives is a brilliant piece of scholarship..." Thomas Flanagan, The New York Review of Books

"Rose Marie Burwell's Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels is an engaging work of criticism that combines several modes into one. It is a critical biography of Hemingway; an interesting account of some years of Burwell's own archival detective work; and a provocative reading of Hemingway's posthumous novels, on one hand, and of Hemingway himself, on the other....Hemingway scholars should read this book." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0521565634
• ISBN 13: 9780521565639
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 284