Ernest Hemingway and the Bullfighter Primer: Genre, Ideology, and Tragedy

Spinks discusses Death in the Afternoon within the genre conventions of the bullfight primer, applying the aesthetic theories of Marxist critic Terry Eagleton to Hemingway’s treatment of bullfighting as a tragic art form. Spinks focuses on class to show that the corrida’s “actual violence is itself a representation of the economic and cultural violence relational with the changeover of one inherently exploitive mode of production, feudalism, to another, capitalism.