(DOWNLOAD) "Hemingway's Christian Name (Ernest Hemingway)" by Notes on Contemporary Literature * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

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Title: Hemingway's Christian Name (Ernest Hemingway)
Author : Notes on Contemporary Literature
Release Date : January 01, 2011
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 48 KB

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Born in 1899, at the very end of the Victorian era, Hemingway was named after his maternal grandfather and always hated his Christian name (there is no St. Ernest). He considered it bourgeois, expressionless and unimaginative, and associated it with the naive, even foolish hero of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In Wilde's play Gwendolen, addicted to the very name of Ernest, marries Jack Worthing, whose real name (it turns out) is Ernest. In 1897, two years before Hemingway was born, Wilde, the antithesis of earnest, was released from prison for homosexual offenses. Hemingway hated not only his first name, but also the whole tradition of moral earnestness, the dominant characteristic of the Victorian age and object of Wilde's sparkling and rather precious satire. Its major prophets were the Anglican church, the dissident low-church Evangelical and high-church Oxford Movements, the hortatory writings of Thomas Carlyle and the muscular Christianity of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby school and father of the poet Matthew Arnold. As Walter Houghton wrote in The Victorian Frame of Mind: "The prophets of earnestness were attacking a casual, easy-going, superficial, or frivolous attitude, whether in intellectual or in moral life; and demanding that men should think and men should live with a high and serious purpose.... The importance of being earnest was first recognized about 1830--on the threshold of the Victorian era ... [when] people had begun to feel a danger or an evil in not being earnest" (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957, pp. 222, 218). The Victorians particularly disliked any mockery of grave or sacred subjects.