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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 25
... individual yet social — a dialectic of oppo- sites that reveal him as one of the most troubling heroes in twentieth - century literature . Such oppositions , Wood concludes , make Harry a protagonist who poses a problem rather than a ...
... individual , presumed able to choose the roles he will play and the commitments he will make , not on the basis of higher truths but according to the criterion of life- effectiveness as the individual judges it . " By choosing the term ...
... individual and society , par- ticularly expressed as the instinctual , sensual and libidinal dimensions of the human being in conflict with social constraints that are politically and eco- nomically determined . Updike quite clearly ...
Other editions - View all
Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |