Teaching Hemingway and the natural world / edited by Kevin Maier.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This volume is the sixth release in the worthy "Teaching Hemingway" series. Maier (Univ. of Alaska Southeast) and his 17 contributing scholars offer many different critical viewpoints on the natural world in Hemingway's short and long fictive, epistolary, and travel/documentary narratives. These include accounts of fishing with his alter ego Nick Adams in Michigan, skiing the Alps, being at war in Europe, the bull-fight season and matadors in Spain, big-game hunting on safari in Africa, and deep-sea fishing in the Gulf Stream. Much of the analysis derives from environmental and ecological perspectives that traditional academic criticism does not normally offer when dealing with the more frequent, societal-based narratives of manners and psychology. Though such perspectives are offered in this collection, the dominant approach is to study Hemingway's protagonists as they orient themselves in and by reference to the water, mountains, fields, and plains and the creatures that inhabit them. The pedagogical dimension of this volume, and its series, makes it likely that there are materials here to satisfy any critic's particular approach. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Stephen Miller, Texas A&M University