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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... suggests , historians will consult these books as barometers of post - World War II American life . Dilvo Ristoff and Edward Vargo look closely at the artistic implications of Updike's use of the artifacts of popular culture - newspaper ...
... suggests a relationship between the loss of space in the United States and the dilution of heroism . The sound of the axes that Natty Bumppo deplores is a staple in Ace's culture . Clearly worried but unable to define his problem , Ace ...
... suggest meliorative irony in Up- dike's treatment of Freudian models . Working primarily from a feminist viewpoint ... suggests that Updike's commentary may be revisionist : " In the civilization of the Fifties the repres- sive father ...
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Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |