Imagination and Idealism in John Updike's Fiction

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Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139427
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagination and Idealism in John Updike's Fiction by : Michial Farmer

Download or read book Imagination and Idealism in John Updike's Fiction written by Michial Farmer and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on the role of the imagination in Updike's works, this book shows him to be an original and powerful thinker and not the callow sensationalist that he is sometimes accused of being.

The Moderate Imagination

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Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700629521
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The Moderate Imagination by : Yoav Fromer

Download or read book The Moderate Imagination written by Yoav Fromer and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Americans finally faced a perplexing political reality: Democrats, purported champions of working people since the New Deal, had lost the white working-class voters of Middle America. For answers about how this could be, Yoav Fromer turns to an unlikely source: the fiction of John Updike. Though commonly viewed as an East Coast chronicler of suburban angst, the gifted writer (in fact a native of the quintessential Rust Belt state, Pennsylvania) was also an ardent man of ideas, political ideas—whose fiction, Fromer tells us, should be read not merely as a reflection of the postwar era but rather as a critical investigation into the liberal culture that helped define it. Several generations of Americans since the 1960s have increasingly felt “left behind.” In Updike’s early work, Fromer finds a fictional map of the failures of liberalism that might explain these grievances. The Moderate Imagination also taps previously unknown archival materials and unread works from his college years at Harvard to offer a clearer view of the author’s acute political thought and ideas. Updike’s prescient literary imagination, Fromer shows, sensed the disappointments and alienation of rural white working- and middle-class Americans decades before conservatives sought to exploit them. In his writing, he traced liberalism’s historic decline to its own philosophical contradictions rather than to only commonly cited external circumstances like the Vietnam War, racial strife, economic recession, and conservative backlash. A subtle reinterpretation of John Updike’s legacy, Fromer’s work complicates and enriches our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s great American writers—even as the book deftly demonstrates what literature can teach us about politics and history.

Updike and Politics

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Author :
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498575617
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis Updike and Politics by : Matthew Shipe

Download or read book Updike and Politics written by Matthew Shipe and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updike & Politics presents the first collection of essays devoted to the political aspects of Updike’s work and showcases a variety of international perspectives.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 2067 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (161 download)

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Book Synopsis Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] by : Linda De Roche

Download or read book Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] written by Linda De Roche and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 2067 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

The Poorhouse Fair

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0679645772
Total Pages : 177 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (796 download)

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Book Synopsis The Poorhouse Fair by : John Updike

Download or read book The Poorhouse Fair written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.”—The New York Times Book Review The hero of John Updike’s first novel, published when the author was twenty-six, is ninety-four-year-old John Hook, a dying man who yet refuses to be dominated. His world is a poorhouse—a county home for the aged and infirm—overseen by Stephen Conner, a righteous young man who considers it his duty to know what is best for others. The action of the novel unfolds over a single summer’s day, the day of the poorhouse’s annual fair, a day of escalating tensions between Conner and the rebellious Hook. Its climax is a contest between progress and tradition, benevolence and pride, reason and faith. Praise for The Poorhouse Fair “A first novel of rare precision and real merit . . . a rich poorhouse indeed.”—Newsweek “Turning on a narrow plot of ground, it achieves the rarity of bounded, native truth, and comes forth as microcosm.”—Commonweal

Feminist Afterlives of the Witch

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031252926
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (312 download)

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Book Synopsis Feminist Afterlives of the Witch by : Brydie Kosmina

Download or read book Feminist Afterlives of the Witch written by Brydie Kosmina and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political efforts in the twentieth century, and how this has indelibly affected cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the symbol through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this book considers the relationship between popular culture and media, activist politics, and cultural memory. Using hauntological theories of memory and temporality, and literary, screen, and cultural studies methodologies, this book considers how popular culture remembers, misremembers, and forgets usable pasts, and the uses (and misuses) of these memories for feminist politics. Given the ubiquity of the witch in popular culture, politics and activism since 2016, this book is a timely examination of the range of meanings inherent to the figure, and is an important study of how cultural symbols like the witch inherit paradoxical memories, histories, and politics. The book will be valuable for scholars across disciplines, including witchcraft studies, feminist philosophy and history, memory studies, and popular culture studies.

Rabbit Redux

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0307744086
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Rabbit Redux by : John Updike

Download or read book Rabbit Redux written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-08-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s becalmed America has become 1969’s lurid turmoil of technology, fantasy, drugs, and violence. Rabbit is abandoned by his family, his home invaded by a runaway and a radical, his past reduced to a ruined inner landscape; still he clings to semblances of decency and responsibility, and yearns to belong and to believe.

John Updike

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Author :
Publisher : Frederick Ungar
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis John Updike by : Suzanne Henning Uphaus

Download or read book John Updike written by Suzanne Henning Uphaus and published by Frederick Ungar. This book was released on 1980 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author of Couples, The Coup, and Rabbit, Run has drawn an increasingly wide readership over the past twenty years, and major critical attention as well. Why are the Updike protagonists torn with such hopeless intensity between their physical desires and their spiritual yearnings? Why so they attempt repeatedly -- and in vain -- to give religious meaning to the sexual act? These are some of the questions addressed in this new study. Each of Updike's ten novels is scrutinized with a discerning critical eye, and a separate chapter explores the notable short stories so frequently anthologized. Updike's unique style, which makes all of his fiction especially memorable, receives full attention. But the major focus here is on his overriding themes of love and anguish, lust and penance. Updike is acutely aware of the moral and spiritual vacuum in contemporary American life. He sees the need for transcendent religious experience -- for which his characters grope. Unhappily, a society that increasingly restricts marital and family commitments diminishes or destroys such a possibility. Readers who respond to the impressive Updike fictional style will find this attractive study an excellent companion to one of our major writers."--Jacket.

Villages

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0307417646
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Villages by : John Updike

Download or read book Villages written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century—from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows Owen Mackenzie from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts. In between these two settlements comes Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen, an early computer programmer, founds with a partner, Ed Mervine, the successful firm of E-O Data, which is housed in an old gun factory on the Chunkaunkabaug River. Owen’s education (Bildung) is not merely technical but liberal, as the humanity of his three villages, especially that of their female citizens, works to disengage him from his youthful innocence. As a child he early felt an abyss of calamity beneath the sunny surface quotidian, yet also had a dreamlike sense of leading a charmed existence. The women of his life, including his wives, Phyllis and Julia, shed what light they can. At one juncture he reflects, “How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!” His life as a sexual being merges with the communal shelter of villages: “A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall.” This delightful, witty, passionate novel runs from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century.

European Perspectives on John Updike

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Author :
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139729
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis European Perspectives on John Updike by : Laurence W. Mazzeno

Download or read book European Perspectives on John Updike written by Laurence W. Mazzeno and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2018 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his first book publication in 1958, the American writer John Updike attracted an international readership. His books have been translated into twenty-three languages, and he has always had a strong following in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Although Updike died in 2009, interest in his work remains strong among European scholars. No recent volume, however, collects diverse European views on Updike's oeuvre. The current book fills that void, presenting essays that perceive Updike's renditions of America through the eyes of scholar/readers from both Western and Eastern Europe--back cover.

The Puttermesser Papers

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0593313194
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis The Puttermesser Papers by : Cynthia Ozick

Download or read book The Puttermesser Papers written by Cynthia Ozick and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality." Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times "A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review

The Value of Herman Melville

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108471447
Total Pages : 173 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis The Value of Herman Melville by : Geoffrey Sanborn

Download or read book The Value of Herman Melville written by Geoffrey Sanborn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the writings of Herman Melville across his career and examines the distinctive qualities of his style.

The Centaur

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 067964587X
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (796 download)

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Book Synopsis The Centaur by : John Updike

Download or read book The Centaur written by John Updike and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”

A Liberal Education in Late Emerson

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Publisher : Camden House
ISBN 13 : 1640140239
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis A Liberal Education in Late Emerson by : Sean Ross Meehan

Download or read book A Liberal Education in Late Emerson written by Sean Ross Meehan and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois.

Patrimony

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0593685032
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis Patrimony by : Philip Roth

Download or read book Patrimony written by Philip Roth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • "A tough-minded, beautifully written memoir" (San Francisco Chronicle) about a son watching his elderly father battle with the brain tumor that will kill him—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father—famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—fights the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.

Understanding John Updike

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611178630
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding John Updike by : Frederic Svoboda

Download or read book Understanding John Updike written by Frederic Svoboda and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close look at the extraordinary literary achievements of a popular and prolific American author The winner of every major American literary prize, John Updike (1932-2009) was one of the most popular and prolific novelists of his time and a major cultural figure who traced the high point and fall of midcentury American self-confidence and energy. A superb stylist with sixty books to his credit, he brilliantly rendered the physical surfaces of the nation's life even as he revealed the intense longings beneath those surfaces. In Understanding John Updike, Frederic Svoboda elucidates the author's deep insights into the second half of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of ordinary men and women. He offers extended close readings of Updike's most significant works of fiction, templates through which his entire oeuvre may be understood. A small-town Pennsylvanian whose prodigious talent took him to Harvard, a staff position at the New Yorker, and ultimately a life in suburban Massachusetts, where the pace of his literary output never slowed, Updike was very much in the American cultural tradition. His series of Rabbit Angstrom novels strongly echo Sinclair Lewis's earlier explorations of middle America, while The Witches of Eastwick and related novels are variations on Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century classic The Scarlet Letter. His number-one best seller Couples examines what Time magazine called "the adulterous society" in the last year of the Kennedy administration, following the nation's fall from idealism into self-centeredness. Understanding John Updike will give both new readers and those already familiar with the author a firm grasp of his literary achievement. This outline of Updike's professional career highlights his importance in the life of the nation—not only as a novelist but also as a gifted essayist, reviewer, cultural critic, and poet.

Blood Meridian

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307762521
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis Blood Meridian by : Cormac McCarthy

Download or read book Blood Meridian written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.