The Intertextual Hemingway

Abstract All the more surprising, then, is the actual aesthetic situation: that at least some parts of his fiction are drawn from other literature-that during the 1920s and the 1930s particularly, Ernest Hemingway was pioneering in what has today become known as “intertextuality.”1 Tracing an author’s borrowings-whether thematic correspondences, stylistic effects, parodies, or parallel characters or scenes—has today become a kind of critical method. Scholars acknowledge that such echoes, such borrowings, do not breech ethical norms. Indeed, using materials that could be found in writing by established authors may be a highly complimentary practice; for American modernist writers like Hemingway, such borrowing might also be ironic.