Scientists beware! One of the finest documentation specialists of soil characteristics was Ernest Hemingway. Henry Mount has assembled hundreds of Hemingway passages and critiqued them from a science-based perspective in his book Hemingway's Tribute to Soil.

Death is an inevitable, yet mysterious event. Fiction is one way to imagine and gain knowledge of death. Death is very useful to literature, as it creates plot twists, suspense, mysteries, and emotional effects in narrations. But more importantly, stories about death seem to have an existential importance to our lives. Stories provide fictional encounters with death and give meaning for both death and life. Thus, death is more than a physical or psychological experience in literature; it also highlights existential questions concerning humanity and storytelling. This volume, entitled Death in Literature, approaches death by examining the narratives and spectacles of death, dying and mortality in different literary genres. The articles consider literary representations of death from ancient Rome to the Netherlands today, and explore ways of dealing with death and dying. The discussions also transcend the boundaries of literature by studying literary representations of such socially relevant and death-related issues as euthanasia and suicide. The articles offer a broad perspective on death’s role in literature as well as literature’s role in the social and cultural debates about death.

The Influence of the European Culture on Hemingway’s Fiction is an essential companion to all those who study Hemingway. The studydeals 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.

Ernest Hemingway’s groundbreaking prose style and examination of timeless themes made him one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Yet in Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action, Mark Cirino observes, “Literary criticism has accused Hemingway of many things but thinking too deeply is not one of them.” Although much has been written about the author’s love of action—hunting, fishing, drinking, bullfighting, boxing, travel, and the moveable feast—Cirino looks at Hemingway’s focus on the modern mind, paralleling the interest in consciousness of such predecessors and contemporaries as Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Henry James. Hemingway, Cirino demonstrates, probes the ways his character’s minds respond when placed in urgent situations or when damaged by past traumas. In Cirino’s analysis of Hemingway’s work through this lens—including such celebrated classics as A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and “Big Two-Hearted River” and less-appreciated works including Islands in the Stream and “Because I Think Deeper”—an entirely different Hemingway hero emerges: intelligent, introspective, and ruminative.

A critical analysis of Hemingway's short fiction plus biographical information.

This book presents a psycho-biographic analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s works so as to map the complex mindscape of the author in order to unearth those thought processes that culminated in the character architecture of his protagonists inaugurating a tradition of a narcissistic self-fictionalization. His epistolary literature has been primarily used as an opulent source of biographic information for profiling the real Hemingway, de-skinning the photogenic cosmetic layers of glamour that this hunter-fisherman-soldier-author had a fetish to don flamboyantly. This methodical, meticulous book dissecting the character anatomies of Hemingway’s protagonists using the tool of biographic chronicle will enable Hemingway aficionados to decipher the narcissism conundrum that haloes this author’s mystic persona.