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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... reading . The repeated scrutiny of a series , however , is apt to complicate the problem that comes with hindsight . If the pleasure of reading Updike's work depends in part upon the fresh en- counter of a narrative in the present tense ...
... reading of Updike's working papers and the final text of Rabbit at Rest . The discon- tinuities between disparate elements that might be erased by finished narra- tive stand exposed when going through the working papers . This synchro ...
... reading of history . The only previous reading he has ever done in the novels is of Consumer Reports , but throughout Rabbit at Rest Harry reads history : " In his semi - retirement he has taken to reading history . It has always ...
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Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |