Hemingway and Posthumanism

Ernest Hemingway is often recognised for his contributions to the intellectual and artistic experimentation of his day, including modernism, primitivism, naturalism and creative nonfiction. He has also long been situated in debates about the environment, often receiving criticism for his hunting practices and taken as iconic of an aggressive masculinity. This collection considers another influential artistic and intellectual formation that has particular resonance for reading Hemingway, despite postdating his life by more than a decade: posthumanism. The contributions highlight the many resonances between Hemingway's life and writing and the notions of posthumanism, including, for example: Hemingway’s emphasis on a human creaturely life; his insistence on human participation in genuine ecologies; his use of and writing about technologies and prosthetics (as in cases of injury); and his scepticism about forces of modernity, economic development, labour norms and more. The collection also shows how investigating Hemingway alongside posthumanism can yield new insights about this author and contribute to posthumanist thought and practice.

Marcos Antonio Norris is a lecturer in the School of Writing, Literature and Film at Oregon State University. He is the author of Hemingway and Agamben: Finding Religion Without God (2023) and the co-editor of Agamben and the Existentialists (2021). Norris has authored more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles, most recently including 'Reading ‘On the Quai at Smyrna’ and ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ in Consideration of Hemingway’s Anti-Humanism' with The Hemingway Review and 'Francis Macomber, the Matador: Reading Hemingway’s ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’' with Studies in the American Short Story.

Ryan Hediger is Professor and Undergraduate Studies Coordinator in the English department at Kent State University. He is the author of Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment (2019), the editor of Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene (2023), the editor of Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America (2013) and the co-editor of Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (2009). Hediger has authored more than twenty peer-reviewed articles and chapters on Hemingway, ecocriticism, and animal studies, most recently including '‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ as an Allegory of the Anthropocene' in The Hemingway Review and 'Becoming with Animals: Sympoiesis and the Ecology of Meaning in London and Hemingway' in Studies in American Naturalism.