The Influence of the European Culture on Hemingways Fiction

By (author) Silvia Ammary

Publication date:

09 June 2015

Length of book:

116 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739187593

The Influence of the European Culture on Hemingway’s Fiction is an essential companion to all those who study Hemingway. The study deals with how Hemingway depicts Europe in his fiction, not necessarily from a biographical point of view, as most critical books have dealt with, but how he assimilates to the culture of Europe, how he portrays the different aspects of that culture in food, music, customs, architecture, and literature. This study views Hemingway’s stories and novels through a new lens by applying new critical developments, emergent approaches, and transnational studies to aid in a fuller understanding of Hemingway.

Europe for Hemingway was a land of discovery, and one cannot study his major novels without analyzing this passion for these lands. The Europe that Hemingway experienced and recorded in his writing serves as an important element in his fiction, becoming “the other,” an alien culture that was sufficiently different from his American roots. Yet this otherness serves first to fulfill his psychological needs to learn and become one of the initiated through suffering—whether it involves himself or the loss of other people around him.
Hemingway’s expert Silvia Ammary allows a deep plunge into Hemingways’s aesthetic Janus: the European varnish of his American stylistics. Written with impeccable knowledge of the author and a brilliant and sharp prose likewise, Ammary’s book becomes a must for any enthusiastic reader or scholar who aims at relishing into the immanent essences of Hemingway’s fiction and the influential medley of Italian, Spanish, and French undercurrents of his American universe—on such crucial keys as character building, psychology, the tantalizing treatment of food and drink, or the trans-Atlantic feat of the subject on the borderland…A splendid immersion that the Hemingway reader will welcome with the luxury of anticipation.