Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit NovelsLawrence R. Broer These essays show the Rabbit novels to be a carefully crafted fabric of changing hues and textures, of social realism and something of grandeur, worthy of Dickens, Thackeray, and Joyce. In the tales of"Rabbit" Angstrom-Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) John Updike has produced one of the most compelling literary tapestries of our time. Updike's Rabbit, the aging high-school basketball star adrift in the century's confusion, is an archetypal American hero, one strikingly real and individual yet emblematic of his class, his country, and his era. Updike's remarkable achievements in these novels as poet and historian-his ingenious weaving of lyric and epic, of art and four decades of American politics-require that the novels be read on a variety of levels, thus lending themselves to the diverse critical approaches represented in Rabbit Tales. Lawrence R. Broer brings together twelve essays by prominent Updike scholars to illuminate the unique achievement of the four Rabbit novels and demonstrate unequivocally the importance of the Rabbit novels to Updike's canon and to 20th-century American literature as a whole. |
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... rich is to be robbed , to be rich is to be poor " ( 375 ) . There is more than a little self - pity here . The truly impoverished might rightly respond that it is they who have been robbed by such economic ineq- uity . Yet Rabbit's ...
... ( Rich 421 ) .30 The loss of this daughter deprives Rabbit of his An- tigone . It makes him feel one with death : it keys into his entire system , leav- ing him useless as a father to the son he does have . What it establishes is the ...
... Rich , looking at " the yellowing basketball feats up on the wall " of the car agency he runs , Harry realizes that at the business he is " a center of sorts , where he had been a forward . " It seems as a player he knew his proper ...
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Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |