In Art Matters, Robert Paul Lamb provides the
definitive study of Ernest Hemingway’s short story aesthetics.
Lamb locates Hemingway’s art in literary historical
contexts and explains what he learned from earlier artists,
including Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Cézanne, Henry James,
Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Stephen Crane, Gertrude
Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. Examining how Hemingway
developed this inheritance, Lamb insightfully charts the evolution
of the unique style and innovative techniques that would forever
change the nature of short fiction.
Art Matters opens with an analysis of the authorial
effacement Hemingway learned from Maupassant and Chekhov,
followed by fresh perspectives on the author’s famous
use of concision and omission. Redefining literary impressionism
and expressionism as alternative modes for depicting modern
consciousness, Lamb demonstrates how Hemingway and Willa Cather
learned these techniques from Crane and made them the foundation
of their respective aesthetics. After examining the development
of Hemingway’s art of focalization, he clarifies what
Hemingway really learned from Stein and delineates their different
uses of repetition. Turning from techniques to formal elements,
Art Matters anatomizes Hemingway’s story openings
and endings, analyzes how he created an entirely unprecedented
role for fictional dialogue, explores his methods of characterization,
and categorizes his settings in the fifty-three stories that
comprise his most important work in the genre.
A major contribution to Hemingway scholarship and to the
study of modernist fiction, Art Matters shows exactly
how Hemingway’s craft functions and argues persuasively
for the importance of studies of articulated technique to
any meaningful understanding of fiction and literary history.
The book also develops vital new ways of understanding the
short story genre as Lamb constructs a critical apparatus
for analyzing the short story, introduces to a larger audience
ideas taken from practicing storywriters, theorists, and critics,
and coins new terms and concepts that enrich our understanding
of the field.
Robert Paul Lamb is professor of English
at Purdue University and coeditor of A Companion to American
Fiction, 1865—1914. He was named the 2008 Indiana
Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. |
