The bones of the others : the Hemingway text from the lost manuscripts to the posthumous novels / Hilary K. Justice.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"There is no work that competes with this. . . . Every chapter is fresh--and always interesting. The Bones of the Others is a strikingly contemporary way to approach this never-dated modernist. Justice shows how Hemingway got where he was trying to go, perhaps even before he knew the direction himself."--Linda Wagner-Martin, Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In this work of literary archaeology and criticism, Hilary Justice tells the narrative of Ernest Hemingway's creative process using published and archival texts to articulate the connections between his life and writing.

In what became The Garden of Eden, Hemingway's character David Bourne identifies his writing process as the creation of a new, forbidden country, asking himself the questions that drove Hemingway's own writing, "So where do you go? I don't know. And what will you find? I don't know. The bones of the others I suppose." Justice's investigations into Hemingway's creative method illuminate the map of Hemingway's forbidden country, revealing his writing as a lifelong simultaneous expression of present and past. Justice locates the power of Hemingway's fiction in this duality--in the paradoxical compulsions toward destruction and creation, lamentation and hope, and fear and love.

Tracing his personal writing from the 1920s through the 1950s, Justice restores the lost manuscripts to their rightful place in the Hemingway canon and answers the question of the writer's suicide.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

If the invocation of the so-called intentional fallacy and the new critical emphasis on close reading of isolated, often brief texts are ever useful, they have no relevance here. Hemingway belongs to that group of writers who leave behind them an extensive, well-dated archival and published record of biographical and creative materials; these include wide correspondence and a wealth of carefully corrected drafts of materials subsequently published or not. Justice's premise is that all Hemingway's life and writing is a hypertext, the definitive "Hemingway text." In this extremely well-documented, biographical-literary study, Justice (Illinois State Univ.) argues that Hemingway's stories of the 1920s, "marriage tales" and the "Nick Adams stories," transformed his personal experience into art. Then, through extensive reference to the meta-critical sections of Death in the Afternoon and The Garden of Eden (posthumously published), the author explores how the writer-author Hemingway came to understand his life as he made it into art. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. S. Miller Texas A&M University