Date Awarded

2005

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Department

American Studies

Advisor

Richard S Lowry

Abstract

This dissertation investigates Ernest Hemingway's authorship as an instance of international modernisms forming as sustained engagements with gender and sexuality. By focusing on four of Hemingway's most experimental texts it shows how a figure of both "high" and "popular" modernism sought to occupy a heterogeneous space of cultural queerness vitalized by masculinity, national and ethnic identities, and writing.;The introduction discusses how post-war gender, sexual, and literary discourses reflected period obsessions with authenticity in the face of a rising commodity culture. It also introduces the dissertation's argument that Hemingway's success in becoming a valuable "literary property" rested on a queer authorial engagement with definitions of American masculinity.;Chapter One traces Hemingway's literary career from the publication of his experimental collection of vignettes in our time in Paris (1924) to the larger New York trade edition which marked his U.S. publishing debut in 1925. The transatlantic and transgressive aspects of Hemingway's "times" illustrate his authoritative and authorial confounding of a highbrow/lowbrow divide of cultural production and affiliations.;Chapter Two examines The Sun Also Rises as a text deeply divided against itself as the product of Jake Barnes and Hemingway's authorship simultaneously. It considers the complex of conflicted desires, fears, and resentments that constitute Hemingway-cum-Barnes's efforts at rendering and remembering lost manhood in the wake of WWI in ways that raise complicated gender questions involving racialized and sexualized boyhood as a promising yet problematic queer zone.;Chapter Three explores further the sexual "funniness" of Hemingway's authorship and considers how Death in the Afternoon, his non-fiction treatise on Spanish bullfighting, constitutes a deliberately queer authorial project where Hemingway attempts to move his writing and popular authorial standing in new directions in order to assert and transcend his public identity as a man, an author, and an American.;Chapter Four examines Green Hills of Africa as a political critique of imperialism and manhood that manifests itself through Hemingway writing himself and his shortcomings as a white modern man and hunter as a self-deprecating literary joke. In writing such a joke, however, Hemingway also sought to reaffirm his own uniquely authoritative masculine authorship.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-yn8y-4f87

Rights

© The Author

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