Dangerous Trips: War Tourism in Willa Cather’s "One of Ours" and Ernest Hemingway’s "A Farewell to Arms"

The essay identifies different models of tourist discourse in Cather’s and Hemingway’s novels, shedding light not only on the conflicted positions of female and male authors in the field of war fiction, but also on their different stances on war remembrance. Whereas Cather has her protagonist embrace the “beaten track” and simultaneously frames her war narrative within a collectively recognizable gaze, Hemingway, by taking his protagonist off the track, turns him into a strongly idiosyncratic tourist: someone who strives to attain an authenticity all of his own, whose legacy of remembrance resists, unlike Cather’s unexceptional hero, participation in the national public memory of World War I.