A New Historicist Study Of Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy

John Updike has established himself as a distinguished American writer and America's Bourgeois artist since the publication of his Rabbit Tetralogy, namely, Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. The monumental works have been described as one of the major achievements of American fiction in the 20 century, in which Updike focuses on the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America by constructing a fictional history which intertwines complex social and cultural contexts with the Harry Angstrom family. The protagonist of Rabbit Tetralogy Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, explores four decades of volatile changes in the American life from the 1950s to the 1980s. By portraying Rabbit as an American Everyman, a representative of the middle class, Updike captures some of the major problems experienced by ordinary Americans of his time. However, John Updike does not just reveal or mirror the American history and culture, instead, he makes a special narrative of the history of his own. In this sense, John Updike does share the same assumption with New Historicists when New Historicism as a method of literary criticism is employed to approach John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy.The thesis consists of three chapters in terms of three key assumptions in New Historicist study, that is, "the historicity of text", "the textuality of history" and the power relations.Chapter One discusses how John Updike intertextually constructs a narrative of his own with social formations, or Montrose's "historicity of text" and respectively analyzes the four Rabbit novels, and finally demonstrates that Rabbit Tetralogy exhibits the social and cultural contradictions of the times, which are the social embedment of his novels.Chapter Two places a particular emphasis on how Updike's history embedded in his novels is textualized. In terms of textualization of history, the detailed depiction of the individual's everyday life, the fictionalized historical events by the mass media and the application of metaphors are all his concerns.Chapter Three starts with the discussion of Rabbit's self-identification and illuminates that Rabbit is represented as a cultural artifact of contemporary America in Rabbit Tetralogy and is both the production of textual representation and the production of the social and cultural contradictions in Updike's fictional history. With regards to the author, when Updike shapes Rabbit into a representative everyman of the middle class in his novels, he also shapes himself from the values and views which his cultures provide. Finally, the author of thesis employs Fredric Jameson's political interpretive mode to demonstrate that Updike's narrative can actually be viewed as a socially symbolic act.It can be concluded from this study that Rabbit Tetralogy is Updike's rewriting of the ideological subtext-the ideology of middleness. In Rabbit Tetralogy, Updike perceives the problems and social contradictions in his society and by dramatizing contradictory situations in Rabbit's lived experience, Updike projects his imaginary solution to social contradictions; but he naturally falls back on his major strategy of containment and appropriates the social-economic contradictions in moral terms-his typical Yes-But tension.