Hughes, Keith

Spinks, Lee

Gilbert, James

2024-06-18T11:10:08Z

2024-06-18T11:10:08Z

2024-06-18

It is the purpose of this thesis to examine the use of elements of the style of Ernest Hemingway in his early fiction aimed to enhance reader engagement in the experience of his fiction. The thesis will then compare the observed adaptation of Hemingway’s style by Joan Didion and Richard Brautigan in their early writing with corresponding attention to the effect on reader engagement. This thesis discusses the essential elements of Hemingway’s style and thematic interests in the context of his place in the modernist movement. More specifically, the short stories in Hemingway’s two first major short story collections, In Our Time (1925), and Men Without Women (1927), as well as his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), will be examined to identify the distinctive features of Hemingway's fiction. With this review, the thesis will proceed to analyze the adaptation of Hemingway’s style in the early writings of Joan Didion and Richard Brautigan. Didion’s early essays, particularly those found in her first collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), as well as her first major novel, Play It as It Lays (1970), will be considered. A similar analysis of Brautigan’s work will be undertaken with reference to his early novels, Trout Fishing in America (1967), and A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964). The Hemingway short stories and novel that are the subject of this thesis were written in the nineteen-twenties. Didion and Brautigan’s essays and fiction under consideration were written in the nineteen-sixties or written about American society in that era. The two periods provide an opportune point of comparison. All three authors were at a comparable stage in their development. Each had emerged to public recognition and each was demonstrating a new and distinctive style fit to address their challenging times. While clearly different in many respects, the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-sixties both witnessed significant political, social and economic disruption. Both periods were also characterized by unprecedented prosperity (in the case of the nineteen-sixties, continued prosperity) after years of deprivation. The resulting affluence supported the opportunity for greater personal freedom and mobility and gave rise to resistance to the moral restrictions and conventions of the previous generation. Hemingway’s writing sought directness and reader engagement and was motivated to expose misguided nineteenth century conventions and also to keep pace with the social and political changes occurring in postwar Europe and America. Didion and Brautigan’s writing was similarly focused on revealing the social disorder at their particular moment in twentieth century America. Hemingway, and then Didion and Brautigan, considered a similar existential question: what is the appropriate response of an individual in a world suffering from senseless violence, misled by materialism and facing social disintegration? Hemingway's invocation of Ecclesiastes in the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises resounds through the work of Didion and Brautigan as well. All three writers recognized the effectiveness of writing that depends on engaging the reader in the experience of their stories. Elements of style in Hemingway’s fiction, adapted by Didion and Brautigan, required the reader’s imagination to visualize landscapes, discern the qualities of the characters, resolve uncertainty in plot and ultimately discover the meaning of the text. This thesis will explore how all three writers have successfully engaged the response of the reader.

https://hdl.handle.net/1842/41890

http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/4613

en

The University of Edinburgh

American literature

Ernest Hemingway

American literary canon

Joan Didion

Richard Brautigan

elements of style

style

uncertainty in plot

meaning in text

reader engagement

'Truer than anything alive': elements of style and reader engagement in the early works of Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion and Richard Brautigan

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy