6 - The Continued Proliferation of Theory, 1995–2009

Summary

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY, edited by Scott Donaldson, later president of the Hemingway Society, was published in 1996, with a collection of essays by notable Hemingway scholars. I’ll deal with the critical essays shortly, but will begin with the bibliographical essay of Susan Beegel, current editor of the Hemingway Review. Beegel prints a graph showing about forty articles and books per year on Hemingway during the period from 1961 through 1965, growing to about fifty articles and books by the end of that decade and to seventy by 1980. The pace of publication plateaued during the first half of the decade, then increased when Hemingway’s manuscripts and other papers were opened to scholars at the Kennedy Library. The pace was increased also by critics who responded to the sexual experimentation of Garden of Eden, reaching over eighty publications a year by 1991. The 1970s, according to Beegel, “saw production of some 729 articles and books about [Hemingway’s] life and work, up 42 percent from the 1960s” (280). Those about The Sun Also Rises constituted only a fraction of these, although a significant fraction. “The Sun Also Rises,” says Beegel, “was the favorite Hemingway novel of the 1970s. Its lost-generation characters, alienated by World War I and self-anesthetized with alcohol, were familiar and appealing to an equally lost generation alienated by Vietnam and experimenting with drugs” (281). Feminism made its mark on criticism, too, with the number of women scholars working on Hemingway rising from 7 percent of the whole in the 1960s to 13 percent in the 1970s (282), while studies of race and ethnicity were minimal. By 1991, women accounted for 29 percent of published Hemingway scholarship (290–91). For a while in the 1980s, Hemingway’s prose, filled with concrete objects, escaped analysis by the adherents of deconstruction, perhaps, as Beegel believes, because “[i]t was simpler for deconstructionists to ignore Hemingway and for Hemingway scholars to ignore deconstruction” (287). But in the 1990s and in the first two decades of the new millennium, that is no longer true. In the late eighties, following Garden of Eden, psychoanalysis and gender studies became commonplace, and most recently, studies that apply racial, ethnic, postcolonial, and environmental analysis to Hemingway’s works have been published. Beegel concludes that Hemingway’s “critical reputation today [in 1996] is stronger than at any time since his death” (294).