Hemingway and the Black Renaissance / edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Holcomb, Gary Edward.

Scruggs, Charles.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961--Criticism and interpretation.

Hemingway, Ernest.

Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961--Influence.

Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

Harlem Renaissance--Influence.

Harlem Renaissance.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

x, 246 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, [2012]

Summary:

Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs, explores a conspicuously overlooked topic: Hemingway's wide-ranging influence on writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day. An observable who's who of black writers-Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Chester Himes, Alex la Guma, Derek Walcott, Gayl Jones, and more-cite Hemingway as a vital influence. This inspiration extends from style, Hemingway's minimalist art, to themes of isolation and loneliness, the dilemma of the expatriate, and the terrifying experience of living in a time of war. The relationship, nevertheless, was not unilateral, as in the case of Jean Toomer's 1923 hybrid, short-story cycle Cane, which influenced Hemingway's collage-like 1925 In Our Time.

Just as important as Hemingway's influence, indeed, is the complex intertextuality, the multilateral conversation, between Hemingway and key black writers. The diverse praises by black writers for Hemingway in fact signify that the white author's prose rises out of the same intensely American concerns that their own writings are formed on: the integrity of the human subject faced with social alienation, psychological violence, and psychic disillusionment. An understanding of this literary kinship ultimately initiates not only an appreciation of Hemingway's stimulus but also a perception of an insistent black presence at the core of Hemingway s writing. Book jacket.

Contents:

A shared language of American modernism : Hemingway and the Black Renaissance / Mark P. Ott

Hemingway's lost presence in Baldwin's Parisian room : mapping Black Renaissance geographies / Joshua Parker

Hemingway and Wright, Baldwin and Ellison / Charles Scruggs

Knowing the recombining : Ellison's ways of understanding Hemingway / Joseph Fruscione

Free men in Paris : the shared sensibility of James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway / Quentin Miller

Hemingway and McKay, race and nation / Gary Edward Holcomb

Cane and In our time : a literary conversation about race / Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland

Rereading Hemingway : rhetorics of whiteness, labor, and identity / Ian Marshall

"Across the river and into the trees, I thought" : Hemingway's impact on Alex la Guma / Roger Field.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814211779

0814211771

9780814292785

081429278X

OCLC:

741355143