Introduction: Ernest Hemingway’s Intimate Geographies

Abstract

Godfrey describes Ernest Hemingway’s “place-consciousness,” a feature of his work that has long been observed yet simultaneously understudied. Hidden in plain sight almost everywhere in his writing, Godfrey makes the case that place-consciousness was a source of great pleasure for Hemingway and was, arguably, a crucial motive to create art as well as a dominant feature of the art itself. To reread Hemingway as a literary and cultural geographer, Godfrey states, can teach us about how real places become imaginative spaces, about how the terrains of the material world and of the imagination influence one another. Godfrey also provides a timely cultural message, reminding readers that places matter to Hemingway in ways we would do well to attend to in an increasingly “placeless” digital age.

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town.

—Robert Frost, “Directive”