Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text

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Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes reread the Hemingway Text--his published and unpublished writing and what is known about his life--and show that gender was one of his conscious preoccupations.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.

Nancy R. Comley is associate professor of English and director of composition at Queens College, City University of New York. She is coauthor (with Robert Scholes) of a number of introductory texts, including The Practice of Writing and Text Book. Robert Scholes, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown University, is the author of four other books published by Yale University Press: Protocols of Reading, Semiotics and Interpretation, Structuralism in Literature, and Textual Power.