Robert W. Lewis – författare

This selection of seventeen essays on the writing of Ernest Hemingway is edited by Robert W. Lewis, the President of the Hemingway Society and Chairman of the Hemingway Foundation. Commentary on Hemingway is now entering new fields with the opening of the enormously rich Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy library in Boston. Lewis' selection illustrates the pluralism and richness of current research and criticism. He has divided these essays into four groupings which examine Hemingway's women characters, his relations with other writers textual and critical studies and his fiction set in Italy. These scholars bring new insight to the understanding of Hemingway's published and unpublished works and illustrate that Hemingway studies have come of age in our time.These seventeen essays demonstrate the maturity and diversity of Hemingway studies. Built on a considerable body of criticism, they utilize revelations from manuscripts and galleys and reach out to other disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. In the first of four groupings scholars reexamine Hemingway's treatment of women and previous misconceptions of his sexual politics. Linda Patterson Miller begins with a general introduction and reassessment. Roger Stephenson concludes this four essay grouping with a provocative tour de force. The second section focuses on four very different relationships: Hemingway with Bernard Berenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers and critics. The third grouping includes four textual analyses. Ranging from intensely personal to scholarly neutral, they all illustrate the richness of current scholarship. Describing Hemingway's strong attachment to Italy, Lewis reminds his readers that Hemingway's imagination was richly nourished by this country. In the fourth and final grouping five scholars conduct a provocative exploration of Hemingway's Italy.

Love was a central theme of Ernest Hemingway’s major works. And although his passages on sexual love and on romantic love may be widely remembered and frequently quoted, says Robert W. Lewis in this scholarly and detailed consideration, Hemingway’s later work revealed his ultimate belief that brotherly love was the supreme love of mankind. Eros, Hemingway concluded, was a neutral value, neither good nor bad in itself, but yet capable of complementing agape in giving man pleasure.By examining the forms and essences of the various kinds of love, Hemingway worked out an explanation and tentative solution to the troubles of the human condition. The tradition of romantic love that had prevailed in Western literature had challenged sexual love and brotherly love and had been confused with them since the Middle Ages. Hemingway’s early work was destructive of romantic love, says Lewis; the work of his middle career was crucial in his exploration for the supreme love and the means to whatever peace and happiness man may achieve. By the time he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, his ethic was formulated and he could write conclusively of the trial and lesson of love in Western civilization in a way that reflected his discovery that true love must be a reciprocal blend of eros and agape between man and woman, man and man, and man and his world.

The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup. As the book demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of debates over public health and urban development and proved to be a key space for mobilising the urban crowd for political rallies and spectator sporting events alike. After 1945, the transformed French stadium constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation but also was increasingly connected to global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport. Drawing from a wide range of sources, the stadium century links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the stadium in an innovative work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike.

In this comprehensive guide, Lewis and Roos reveal how A Farewell to Arms represents a complex alchemy of Hemingway’s personal experience as a Red Cross ambulance driver in 1918, his extensive historical research of a time period and terrain with which he was personally unfamiliar, and the impact of his vast reading in the great works of 19th-century fiction. Ultimately, Lewis and Roos assert, Hemingway’s great novel is not simply a story of love and war, as most have concluded, but an intricate novel of ideas exploring the clash of reason and faith and deep questions of epistemology.The commentary also delves deeply into the roots of controversy surrounding the novel’s treatment of gender issues through the characters of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley. Catherine, they argue, is far more than an object of love; she is a real feminist heroine who is responsible for Frederic’s maturation in developing a capacity for true love. Written in clear and accessible prose that will appeal to scholars and Hemingway neophytes alike, Reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is the most sweeping guide yet available to Hemingway’s finest novel, and contributes to a richer understanding of the writer’s entire body of work.