Although criticism has established The Sun Also Rises as Hemingway's most enduring novel, Hemingway's public figure, an historical failure to recognize his wide reading, a general failure to acknowledge his fiercely competitive spirit as a writer, the recent discovery of the drafts of the novel, and an inadequate comparison between his simultaneously written The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises have prevented an adequate critical appraisal of what will remain Hemingway's most written about and admired piece of fiction. / Not at all separate and distinct from The Torrents of Spring--generally regarded as little more than Hemingway's embarrassing parody of Sherwood Anderson--The Sun Also Rises must be seen as a refined and controlled effort to establish a literary identity in the contexts of both Realism and Modernism. Similarities between what are widely regarded as his greatest and least novels demonstrate that the aggressive young Hemingway actively imitated and challenged a variety of writers ranging from the greatest names in literature to the ephemerae of a forgotten literary past. The Sun Also Rises must finally be accepted as a phenomenal apprentice work by an aggressive author who was in a process of stylistic evolution as he wrote his first novels. That which makes The Sun Also Rises unique to Hemingway's canon and a performance which could not be repeated is, in all probability, the fact that in that volume Hemingway directly addressed--by name, allusion, imitation, and parody--the major voices in his own immediate literary past and the major contemporary voices of an exciting postwar literature. Although the unique voice which Hemingway forged as he wrote The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises has become, perhaps, the best known literary voice of this century, The Sun Also Rises remains proto-Hemingway, an evolutionary voice compounded of his literary forbears and contemporary competitors. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2927. / Major Professor: Anne E. Rowe. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76462 |
| Contributors | Willey, John Robert, Jr., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 428 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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