Call for Papers for a Special Issue of The Hemingway Review
The session on “To Feel More than You Understand: Incorporating the First-Person Voice into Hemingway Scholarship” at the 20th International Hemingway Conference in Spain generated lively interest in the ways scholarly writing that adapts a personal and even intimate approach to the reading of Hemingway’s texts can amplify and deepen the meaning of the texts and the experience of the reader. During the session, Linda Patterson Miller highlighted and illustrated from experience how Hemingway’s prose triggers personal memories and how bringing these responses to academic writing can enhance our appreciation for the powerful emotional undercurrents of Hemingway’s writing. As Hemingway famously said, what the writer leaves out will allow the reader to feel more than understand. During Ann Putnam’s presentation, she illustrated with readings from her novel Cuban Quartermoon how Hemingway and place (such as visiting those places and/or attending Hemingway conferences) can stimulate one’s own creative responses.
One outcome of the session was a call for a special issue of The Hemingway Review that will focus on how personal experience has allowed the writer to reimagine and perhaps rethink Hemingway’s writing. We are making our call now. We invite papers that bring scholars’ own lived experience to their reading of Hemingway (perhaps to a particular work or works), an approach that might challenge and simultaneously broaden the established configurations of “scholarly” prose. Scholars and general readers of Hemingway are invited to submit papers that explore in some way the writer’s personal journey in Hemingway studies. The writer might depict those snippets of memory that Hemingway’s prose triggers. Or, the writer might consider the ways that reading a particular work or works has evolved and/or changed over time because of personal experience. Or the writer might illuminate how a particular activity, such as fly-fishing, or deep-sea fishing, or traveling has been enhanced through reading Hemingway and vice versa. Writers might consider how their interactions with the various people and places that informed Hemingway’s writing have enriched their lives and informed their reading and interpretation of Hemingway and his writings. We hope these submissions—more of an essay format than an academic treatise--will stimulate a distinctively new academic genre that allows for a more personal voice (yes, you can use the pronoun I!) and a richer understanding of the emotional undercurrents of Hemingway’s prose.
Linda Patterson Miller and Ann Putnam will serve as guest editors of this special issue. Submissions should be approximately 6250 words for a full article or 2500 words for a “note.” Submissions should be sent to thehemingwayreview@gmail.com and must be received by September 30, 2025.