272 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
Literary Criticism | Literary Criticism / American
In The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers, Robert Paul Lamb delivers a dazzling analysis of the craft of this influential writer. Lamb scrutinizes a selection of Hemingway’s exemplary stories to illuminate the author’s methods of construction and to show how craft criticism complements and enhances cultural literary studies. The Hemingway Short Story, the highly anticipated sequel to Lamb’s critically acclaimed Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, reconciles the creative writer’s focus on art with the concerns of cultural critics, establishing the value that craft criticism holds for all readers.
Robert Paul Lamb received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University. He is author of Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story and coeditor of A Companion to American Fiction, 1865–1914. He was named the 2008 Indiana Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.
“In this excellent study of several examples of Hemingway’s layered, complex short stories, Robert Paul Lamb has given us new ways to understand Hemingway’s craft.” —Hemingway Review
“Anyone who savors the taut style and wry innuendo of Hemingway’s short fiction will appreciate the meticulous readings Robert Paul Lamb provides in The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers. These fine-grained elucidations of five exemplary stories complement the broader discussion of narrative poetics in Lamb’s equally impressive Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. In the new volume, Lamb’s treatment of such texts as “Indian Camp” and “Big Two Hearted River” brings biography, cultural history, criticism, and theory to bear on each paragraph, and his analysis of interpolated narrative codes (à la Roland Barthes) seems astute, as does his occasional parsing of the meter of crucial lines. Reading The Hemingway Short Story is like attending a master class on literary craft; an expert scholar-critic reveals the subtle methods and moves that produce the distinctive, memorable effects that comprise Hemingway’s literary signature.”—J. Gerald Kennedy, author of Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity and coeditor of Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture
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