Hemingway, Ecology and Culture

The Anthropocene has ushered in remarkable progress and unprecedented challenges, with ecological crises threatening all life—especially the most vulnerable. In search of new solutions in this open access book, Lay Sion Ng turns to an unexpected source: Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway’s ecological perspective is often overlooked in his work. This book expands on emerging scholarship, exploring Hemingway’s non-anthropocentric view of non-human entities to offer fresh insights into the author and his nonhuman characters in his long-length fiction such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea and The Garden of Eden, as well as short stories like The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Big Two-Hearted River and A Natural History of the Dead.

Through a multidisciplinary lens—including material ecocriticism, eco-gothic, posthumanism, light/colour ecology, olfactory discourse, environmental history, and cultural ecology—Ng challenges the notion of Hemingway as merely a hyper-masculine figure. Instead, she reveals his texts as "ecological forces" that can heighten our awareness of nonhuman agency, leading us to understand our own place in this interconnected world.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective