John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History(18 Modern American Literature: New Approaches)

John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History is a new historicist reading of Updike's last Rabbit novel. It follows the day-to-day chronology of events, in the novel and in the media, showing how history, with its variety and polyphonic immediacy, is appropriated by the characters, with what criteria, through which tropes, and to what ideological purpose. Although the emphasis of the text falls on Updike's appropriation of American history in the 1980's as it manifests itself in Rabbit at Rest, significant references are also made to the other Rabbit novels. These novels show how the history of the earlier decades is made into a motive for the characters' thoughts, feelings, and actions.

About the Author :
The Author: Dilvo I. Ristoff, Professor Titular of English at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Florianopolis, Brazil, is the author of Updike's America: The Presence of Contemporary American History in John Updike's Rabbit Trilogy, the first book-length discussion of Updike's Rabbit novels. He has also published essays on James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jerzy Kozinski, and other contemporary American writers. Professor Ristoff is the founder and during many years was the editor of Ilha do Desterro, the journal of language and literature of the English Graduate Program at Santa Catarina. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Review :
Dilvo Ristoff's new study of John Updike's fourth Rabbit novel, 'Rabbit at Rest', is essential reading for every Updike scholar. Following what Professor Ristoff calls a 'scene-centered approach' such as he used in 'Updike's America', his earlier study of the first three Rabbit novels, Professor Ristoff provides an in-depth examination of Updike's extensive use of contemporary American history. More than that, 'John Updike's Rabbit at Rest: Appropriating History' reveals how and why that history is used. This study, which is a remarkably thorough delving into Updike's historical imagination, makes fascinating reading in part because of its clear, direct style. After completing it we are bound to have heightened respect for Updike's (and Ristoff's) encyclopedic knowledge and are also likely to read the Rabbit tetralogy as a kind of panorama of the American scene from the 1950s until the early 1990s. (Townsend Ludington, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Dilvo Ristoff's new study offers an intriguing portrait of John Updike as a meticulous chronicler of American history. Yet, as Ristoff's brilliant and carefully researched analyses show, we - and Updike's fictional characters - never perceive history in an objective fashion. On the contrary, in tracing how Updike structures his novels on a web of references to topical newspaper reports and TV broadcasts, Ristoff makes us understand how history is constantly fashioned and transfomed by the media. This study is an extraordinary accomplishment, indeed' (Professor Bernd Engler, University of Tuebingen, Germany)