Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity

In this provocative book, Thomas Strychacz pursues a new approach to the question of masculinity in Ernest Hemingway's work. He begins with a close reading of Hemingway's famous story The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber and continues through the story cycle In Our Time; the short story The Undefeated; the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea; and the nonfiction books Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. masculine style and promotes an ideal of stoic, independent manhood, Strychacz argues that Hemingway's fiction poses masculinity as a theatrical performance. Masculinity emerges from a series of complex negotiations between male characters, readers and cultural codes of manhood. Hemingway's masculine style should be seen as deeply rhetorical, inviting the audience to think of masculinity as a contention to be debated rather than a fact that demands acquiescence. casts interpretive light on Heminway's artistry. It contributes significantly to the larger cultural discussions about the nature of masculinity while offering an analysis and critique of masculinity in Heminway's work that greatly extends scholarly debates about masculine modernism. It raises the compelling question of what is modernism if masculinity is exposed as more problematic and elusive than previously suspected.