Literary Topics: Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate Modernist Movement (review)

BOOK REVIEWS · 121 Literary Topics: Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate Modernist Movement. By Kirk Curnutt. Gale Study Guides to Great Literature.Volume Two. Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, 2000.240 pp + xii. Cloth $49.95. In 2000, Gale Publishing, the flagship for academic reference books, launched an innovative type ofstudyguide ofwhich ErnestHemingwayand the ExpatriateModernist Movementis one volume. These guides actually consist of three interlocking series: "Gale Study Guides to Literary Masters," looking at specific writers; "Gale Study Guides to Literary Masterpieces," treating specific works, and, finally, "Gale Study Guides to Literary Topics," examining general movements or genres such as magical realism orhard-boiled fiction. Each specific volume has a related volume in the other series: for example, Ernest Hemingway and the ExpatriateModernist Movementis volume two of the Literary Topics series, corresponding with volume two of the Literary Masterpiece series on The Sun Also Rises, and volume two of the Literary Masters series on Hemingway. Conceivably, the three volumes used in conjunction would give the student a field ofvision ranging from the specific to the general, as well as the tools to enter into a text critically, biographically, and historically. The guides, meant for high school and undergraduate students , differ from CliffNotes type"StudyGuides."They are more akin to historical and critical casebooks, giving the student the background and context ofthe author or work, and guiding him/her to other sources. Kirk Curnutt has done an excellentjob creatinga general overview ofParis in the 1920s as related to Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate ModernistMovementisconsistentlywell -written,concise,and easilydigestible,replete with illustrations, chronology,literaryglossary,biographies, thorough bibliography of important expatriates, and study questions. Any slight criticism 1 might have stems from the impossibility ofcapturing such a fertile, complex, and turbulent time period in a necessarilydistilled project linked to a singleauthor. With any such endeavor, the concept of modernism necessarily hovers over the book. Curnutt's term "expatriate modernist movement" is itself a means to rein in the amorphousconcept ofmodernism—a concept thatdefies reduction, as it should. Curnutt adroitlyand intelligentlysidesteps the problems inherent in a general overview ofmodernism by restricting his approach specifically to the American expatriate movement in France in the 1920s, and even more specifiIHi MtMiNiiWAY rlvhw, vui. 22. so. i. TALL 2002. Copyright © 2002 Carol Hemingway. All Rights Reserved. Published by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. 122 ¦ THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW cally,to Hemingway(besides,themoregeneral topicofmodernismwasthesubject of Gale's first volume of Literary Topics accompanying the Fitzgerald and Gatsby volumes). The underlying and unavoidable theme is that Paris in the 1920s wasa formativeand necessaryforge for Hemingway'scraft,and moregenerally formative in shaping modern American literature. There is nothing groundbreaking here (nor should one expect such from a studyguide), but the book is a deft and thorough introduction to the complex scene of modernist Paris and Hemingway's equallycomplex relationship to it. After quickly defining the general concept of expatriation as opposed to exile, Curnutt hits his stride in the first chapter, nimbly establishing those aspects of modernism that prompted expatriate cynicism and the American artistic exodus after the First World War. He laudably substantiates this exodus with specific examples, including the freedoms to be found in Paris not only for writers like Hemingway, but for African-Americans, women, and homosexuals, citing, for example, Hughes, MacKaye, Fauset, Stein, and Beach. Curnutt is conscious that a study guide is the perfect opportunity to rewrite/re-right modernism's traditional, slanted definition, and considering Hemingway's embattled position in gender studies, Curnutt rarely loses the opportunity to revise the much maligned stereotype ofHemingway's female characters as reductive, the products ofmisogyny. However, among the assorted biographies and descriptions peppered throughout the book, I would have liked a more overt statement about the important role that women played as editors and actuators in the Modernist scene. Over the course of the book, Curnutt pays special attention to the effect that expatriation had on American literature from the pre-modernist expatriates such as James, Irving, Twain, and Hawthorne through Hemingway and his contemporaries, such as John Dos Passos and Henry Miller, etc. He also examines the nostalgic self-fascination ofmodernist expatriates in works such as A Moveable Feasl and Morley Callaghan's...