This is a daring and fascinating book, which adds yet another chapter to the recent revisionist work that has altered forever the way we read Hemingway and his writings. Arguing that Hemingway and his male protagonists are consumed by a need to be dominated sexually by women, Fantina alters our understanding of the heterosexuality of Hemingway and his heroes. Sorting carefully through theories of masochism, Fantina cleverly explains the contradictory impulses of Hemingway and his men: their attraction to forbidden desires and acts which seem to stand in such stark contrast to their dominating bravado when in the public eye. Ultimately, this book makes a compelling case for the queer heterosexuality of Hemingway and the male characters he created in his own image. Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism fills an important gap in recent work on the transgressive sexuality of Hemingway and his characters, and as such will be a welcome contribution by many Hemingway scholars. - Debra A. Moddelmog, author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit of Ernest Hemingway
Considerations of gender and sexuality have been central to Hemingway studies for the past decade. This book s great virtue is that it has something new to tell us about Ernest Hemingway. It has outstanding insights into Hemingway s work. - Carl P. Eby, author of Hemingway s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood