Citation

Cain WE. Society 2015; 52(1): 80-85.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12115-014-9860-4

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Ernest Hemingway's aesthetic--a better term than style--is based on constant acts of choice, decisions that he makes as a writer at every moment about which word and phrase to set down on the page. All writers must make choices--what to include, what to exclude. Hemingway is special because his work as a writer foregrounds this fact. The structure of Hemingway's sentences makes the reader keenly aware of the words that he has selected and, just as much or more, the countless other possibilities that he has not selected. Hemingway first presented and developed his aesthetic in his major novels and short stories of the 1920s. But this high level of achievement proved very difficult for Hemingway to sustain in the decades that followed. The story of his aesthetic, the shape of his literary career, is both triumphant and tragic. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Language: en

Keywords

Suicide; Hemingway; Aesthetic; Prose; Sentence; Anderson; Eliot; Faulkner; Joyce; Modern Literature; Stein; Style