Messent draws on contemporary theory and recent scholarship to examine the body of Hemingway’s published writing. Analyzes style in “Now I Lay Me” considering Georg Lukac’s essay “Narrate or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (1936) to reveal Hemingway’s concerns with modernity. Discusses the problematic representation of self in “A Way You’ll Never Be,” The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Across the River and into the Trees. Analyzes the instability of gender roles and sexuality in “Hills Like White Elephants,” A Farwell to Arms and The Garden of Eden. Geography, particularly America, Spain, and Africa, is covered in his treatment of the author’s sense of literary place in Death in the Afternoon, The Dangerous Summer, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Concludes with a brief commentary on A Moveable Feast as Hemingway’s attempt to recreate his former writerly identity while unconsciously exposing his decline
