I'm not saying that people get their ideals of manliness from Hemingway, as such, but that he has had a profound influence on those sorts of concepts. Whether you or I like his writing, he seems to be considered as pretty much the ultimate "man's man" when it comes to literature; his prose is the standard example of "manly writing"; his obsession with hunting and shooting and men carrying out acts of manly violence together has made him iconic in that sense.
So I do think that if you took the almost stereotypical manliness of Hemingway and his oeuvre and replaced his writing with (well-written) cookbooks you might see some interesting changes - both in attitudes towards cookery (and related gender roles) and perhaps even in broader cultural categories of manliness, how masculinity is defined.
It's possible that popular culture would, instead, have turned to a different hyper-masculine author, but even that might have had differences. He was an influential literary writer, after all; his style especially. I do think the hypothetical AU would have to be set in or fairly close to his own time, because the changes wouldn't be that obvious otherwise, though.
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Date: 2008-08-12 07:42 pm (UTC)So I do think that if you took the almost stereotypical manliness of Hemingway and his oeuvre and replaced his writing with (well-written) cookbooks you might see some interesting changes - both in attitudes towards cookery (and related gender roles) and perhaps even in broader cultural categories of manliness, how masculinity is defined.
It's possible that popular culture would, instead, have turned to a different hyper-masculine author, but even that might have had differences. He was an influential literary writer, after all; his style especially. I do think the hypothetical AU would have to be set in or fairly close to his own time, because the changes wouldn't be that obvious otherwise, though.