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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... wife appears in the later Rabbit nov- els . Updike continues instead to explore such types in the concurrent se- ries based on The Scarlet Letter , and that leaves Angstrom more or less stranded in a secular world . As a result , his ...
... wife , Janice ; he takes up with Ruth , a part - time prostitute , whom he abandons in turn when Janice goes into labor with their second child . He returns to his wife , whom he abandons again for Ruth , and the final sentences of the ...
... wife while he masochistically takes cocaine to escape his woes ( Rich 124 ) . Projecting his own insecurity about gender onto Nelson , Rabbit leaves his son without any form of paternal security.3 31 Rabbit's major acting out of this ...
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Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels Lawrence R. Broer No preview available - 2000 |