Title
Innovation as Pugilism: Hemingway and the Reader after A Farewell to Arms
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Opens with an overview of Hemingway’s early “honeymoon” period with readers ending with A Farewell to Arms. Discusses Hemingway’s innovative but divisive writings of the 1930s, which attacked readers and critics for their failure to understand serious art. Argues that Death in the Afternoon, To Have and Have Not, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” reflect the author’s compositional anxiety and contempt for inept readers, resulting in “schizophrenic fictional structures that defy critical comprehension.” Contends that awkward and overwritten portions of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” were included as a duplicitous move by Hemingway’s to mislead an inattentive reader.
Published in
Narrative Innovation and Incoherence: Ideology in Defoe, Goldsmith, Austen, Eliot, and Hemingway
Date
1992
Pages
146-188
Citation
Boardman, Michael M. “Innovation as Pugilism: Hemingway and the Reader after A Farewell to Arms.” In Narrative Innovation and Incoherence: Ideology in Defoe, Goldsmith, Austen, Eliot, and Hemingway, 146-88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.