Textual studies scholar Robert Trogdon, currently editing the Library of America edition of Hemingway’s 1922–1926 stories and novels, argues that textual criticism of Hemingway has largely been stunted for two decades. The main culprit has been the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which in 1998 added twenty years to the traditional limits of copyright to ninety-five years. As a result, major novels such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are only now approaching public domain. Trogdon argues that in the meantime a surprising amount of textual corruptions have been allowed to pass from edition to edition through Hemingway’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and through the Hemingway estate. Detailing several rather striking typos, printer-induced errors, and even dropped lines of dialogue, Trogdon makes the case for a scholarly edition that would not only correct this errata but also restore Hemingway’s original intentions at moments he was restricted by obscenity and libel concerns to alter his manuscripts and typescripts. One such famous moment was Scribner’s refusal to print the word “cocksucker” in A Farewell to Arms; another was Maxwell Perkins’s insistence that he change an attack on F. Scott Fitzgerald in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” to a fictional name.

In “Trauma Studies: Hemingway’s Neurological and Corporeal Injuries,” Sarah Anderson Wood examines the way recent developments in trauma studies and increased awareness of mental health issues have enhanced and sometimes reframed Hemingway scholarship about his mental and physical health over the course of his life, but particularly in regard to the author’s rapid decline in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Trauma studies, Wood contends, has informed advances in medical science, in psychiatry, in the historicity of treatment and therapy, and simply in the artistic representation of pain, all of which have impacted scholars’ understandings of Hemingway’s relationship to suffering. Wood also points to studies that are exploring the impact these conditions may have had on his later writing and to the potential of the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which looks at gene expression and not simply genetic coding. She pays particular attention to Andrew Farah’s Hemingway’s Brain and Linda Wagner-Martin’s Hemingway’s Wars: Public and Private Battles (both 2017).

In “Hemingway and Pleasure,” David Wyatt (re)introduces readers to Hemingway as a sensualist. Wyatt suggests that Hemingway’s deep, if complicated, appreciation of pleasure and sensuality has been occluded by years of criticism that focus the moral implications of pleasure and the idea that Hemingway’s stoicism and sense of discipline put him at odds with the release of enjoyment – basically the theme as iterated in A Moveable Feast: “Hunger is Good Discipline.” Wyatt argues that contemporary culture’s fascination with artisanal food and drink and with raw, natural experiences have provided a path to recovering Hemingway’s sense of pleasure. He canvasses recent popular and scholarly works that celebrate Hemingway’s love of food, drink, sex, art, and good living in general as he reads specific passages from Hemingway’s work to demonstrate the author’s consistent interest in these experiences. Critics examined include Nicole J. Camastra and Hilary Kovar Justice, among others. Wyatt finally argues that, for Hemingway, pleasure challenges us to be fully present and to have the desire of pleasure renewed in the face of the certainty that all pleasure must end.