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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... less stranded in a secular world . As a result , his adultery in Rabbit Is Rich is merely a comic scene of wife - swapping on a Caribbean vacation , and sleeping with his daughter - in - law in the final volume only happens when Rabbit ...
... less gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter , he runs . Ah : runs . Runs " ( 284 ) . All of Rabbit's improvised escapes , all of his bouncing back and forth , demonstrate the impossibility of any ...
... less erotically alluring . Rabbit reads his wife's infidelity as a sign of the rampant faithlessness inveigling the entire age . He is especially impatient with the antipatriotism of the black revolutionaries and the white protesters ...
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Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |