Art Matters

Art Matters provides the definitive study of Ernest Hemingway's short story aesthetics, locating Hemingway's art in literary historical contexts and explaining what he learned from earlier artists such as Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Cézanne, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. By examining how Hemingway developed this inheritance, the author insightfully charts the evolution of the unique style and innovative techniques that would forever change the nature of short fiction. ¶ Art Matters is a major contribution to Hemingway scholarship and to the study of modernist fiction, and shows exactly how Hemingway's craft functions and argues persuasively for the importance of studies of articulated technique to any meaningful understanding of fiction and literary history. The book also develops vital new ways of understanding the short story genre, as Lamb constructs a critical apparatus for analyzing the short story and coins new terms and concepts that enrich our understanding of the field

Robert Paul Lamb is professor of English at Purdue University.