Primarily, the thesis will reconsider the "minority report" position regarding Hemingway, and attempt to rationalize attendant charges that Hemingway's later fiction betrayed elements of self-parody (Across the River and Into the Trees. 1950), self-imitation (The Old Man and the Sea, 1952), and self-indulgence (A Moveable Feast, 1964). The minority report holds that the later writer had come to identify with the image of his public persona, and that subsequent attempts at fiction were as a result overcharacterized by self-congratulation, wish-fulfillment, and a crucial loss of ironic or otherwise aesthetic distance. The paper will dispute the biographical bias which advances much of this rationale by demonstrating that Hemingway's alleged decline as a writer is in any case incidental to his fame, and that his fame as a writer is incidental to the biographical fallacy in Hemingway criticism. The paper will propose instead that the Hemingway persona had become derivative, had ceased to offer a reliable alibi for fiction for which his readers, attracted in the first place by the author's much-publicized dictum of writing-after-experience, had come to expect a reasonable basis in autobiographical reality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.24094 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | McKendy, Andrew. |
| Contributors | Ohlin, Peter (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001538805, proquestno: MM19907, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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