Imagination And Idealism In John Updike S Fiction

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.

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 & Politics presents the first collection of essays devoted to the political aspects of Updike’s work and showcases a variety of international perspectives.

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.

"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.

In this study of a series of artist novels, individuality is elucidated by childhood experiences, sensuality and receptivity, the urge for self-expression, relation to nature, and creative work. Individuality is essentially the recognition of one’s self as a unique part of a whole, which is apt to be discovered in kinship with nature and expressed in aesthetics that stem from an appreciation of nature. The featured novels are Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, John Updike’s Seek My Face, and Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse.

Prolific in a variety of genres, John Updike is one of North America's premier men of letters, regularly producing novels, poetry, short fiction, and volumes of assorted prose. Without question, he is one of the most widely read contemporary American authors. Updike's elegant fiction on the tensions and tragedies of contemporary middle-class life have earned him numerous awards, including the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Rabbit is Rich. Updike is also a serious craftsman of the short story, with 10 collections and 200 short stories to his credit. His stature as a writer of short fiction warrants close examination, particularly in light of the author's active contribution to the genre's current revitalization through formal experimentation and stylistic excellence. In John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction, Robert M. Luscher focuses exclusively on Updike's short fiction. In this comprehensive treatment of all of Updike's short fiction, Luscher explores each of Updike's story collections separately and in approximate chronological order. Luscher adopts this traditional approach, because each collection has a dominant thematic focus and examines characters in a particular phase of development. Updike's short fiction captures the changing historical background, the shifting social mores, and the personal responses to the altered socio-cultural circumstances that have heightened spiritual uncertainty, social unrest, sexual freedom, and domestic tension. Each successive collection shows Updike experimenting with different techniques as his focus on American domestic life adjusts to accommodate new emphases. Luscher reveals how the particular form and techniques Updike employs areadapted to the materials. As Updike's emphasis on different phases of experience shifts, so does the manner in which he handles his subjects. Luscher's examination is amplified by Updike's own commentary on the art of fiction. He foregrounds Updike's remarks on writing and attitudes about his material, rather than the autobiographical content of his stories. Robert M. Luscher's well organized presentation, cogent use of existing scholarship, and persuasive insights are sure to make this a ground-breaking study of John Updike's short fiction.