Introduction: Entering the Garden—The Genealogy of a Reading

Abstract

The Introduction maps the genealogy of wound theory in Hemingway studies, from its origins in Young and Cowley’s war wound theory to the rise of a competing androgynous wound theory, prompted by the posthumous publication of GOE, producing a body of scholarship (Lynn, Spilka, Eby, Moddelmog et al.) that reads against the grain of this earlier critical tradition. Hemingway, Trauma, and Masculinity seeks to reconcile the tensions between these wound theories, advancing the thesis that the wounds of war and androgyny are really sequential variations of the same wound of emasculation. This thesis is developed by reading Hemingway’s narratives as trauma narratives, through the critical lens of Freudian and post-Freudian trauma theory. The genealogy of contemporary trauma theory is mapped from its origins in Deconstruction and Feminist theory.