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Author: John Updike Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0679645772 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
“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
Author: John Updike Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0679645772 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
“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
Author: John Updike Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0345468236 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
“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
Author: William H. Pritchard Publisher: Liverpool University Press ISBN: 9781558495074 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Presents a look at the work, career, and literary reputation of John Updike. By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms - novel, poem, and short story. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these forms. This book offers a portrait of the writer and his work.
Author: John Updike Publisher: National Geographic Books ISBN: 0394410505 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike’s first novel, was written in 1957 and published in January of 1959. For this, its sixth printing, the author has appended an introduction discussing the book’s inspiration, its aesthetic sources and models in classics of science fiction, and the way in which its future (projected to be about 1977) compares with the present. The Poorhouse Fair was hailed at the time of its publication as “a rare and beautiful achievement” and “a work of intellectual imagination and great charity.” Though its future has degenerated into our present, and Updike’s later work is better known, such critics as Henry Bech have hailed this little novel as, still, “surely his masterpiece.”
Author: Karl F. Zender Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807181374 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
With this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on our understanding of Faulkner’s achievement. Sympathetically acknowledging the need to decenter the canon, Zender’s searching interrogation of current theory clears a breathing space for Faulkner and his readers between the fustier remnants of New Criticism and the excesses of post-structuralism. Each chapter opens with a balanced presentation of the genuine gifts contemporary theory has bestowed on our comprehension of a particular novel or problem in Faulkner criticism and then proceeds with a groundbreaking reading. “The Politics of Incest” challenges older psychoanalytic interpretations of Faulkner’s use of the incest motif, and “Faulkner’s Privacy” defends the novelist’s difficulty or “reticence” as an aesthetic resistance against the rude candor of deregionalized and depersonalized culture. Subsequent chapters take up the volatile issues of Faulkner’s representations of women and of African Americans, and a close reading of the classic “Barn Burning” critiques the current tendency to blur the concepts of patriarchy and paternity. The elegiac final chapter, “Where is Yoknapatawpha County?” draws on a comparison with John Updike’s Pennsylvania fiction and a reading of Joan Williams’s The Wintering to explore Faulkner’s disinclination to represent the quotidian realities of southern life in his later novels. Zender shows that Faulkner’s stylistic withdrawal attempts to “transform into beauty” his alienation from the postwar world and his fear of aging. That Faulkner and the Politics of Reading itself recovers and gives new luster to Faulkner’s beauty will surely please, in the author’s words, “those readers . . . for whom literature is less a mechanism of social change than a source of pleasure.” The originality of its critical vision will inspire Faulkner scholars, students of American literature, and general readers.
Author: Yoav Fromer Publisher: University Press of Kansas ISBN: 0700629521 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
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.
Author: Vigen Guroian Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing ISBN: 9780802841902 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 148
Book Description
Responding to the current preoccupation with assisted suicide, the author discusses society's moral confusion over the meaning of death and gives a Christian alternative consistent with traditional ascription of value to human life.
Author: Renée Rose Shield Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501718185 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
"If we continue, we grow old, and this is how it could be for us," writes Renée Rose Shield in her candid and sympathetic account of life in one American nursing home. Drawing on anthropological methods and theory to illuminate institutional life, she probes the sources of the profound sense of unease she found at the place she calls "The Franklin Nursing Home."For fourteen months Shield participated in life at a nursing home in the northeastern United States. She got to know many of the people associated with the home—doctors, nurses, custodians, kitchen workers, administrators, social workers, visiting relatives, and above all, the residents, who emerge in this book as the individuals they are. Sections in which the residents speak poignantly in their own voices are woven throughout her richly detailed observations of everyday routines and events. We see them using guile and humor to get by, struggling to approach the end of their lives with a measure of autonomy and dignity, and we meet an often conscientious and caring staff constrained by conflicting professional perspectives and by the bureaucratic structure in which they work.There are no villains here. Rather, Shield explains how conditions in the nursing home create a difficult and uncomfortable "liminality"—the transition from an accustomed role to a new one-for the residents. In characterizing nursing-home existence, she goes beyond Erving Goffman's classic definition of the "total institution" to show how residents pass from adulthood to death without the comfort of ritual or community support common in rites of passage. In addition to the isolation created by this solitary passage, she finds restrictions on "reciprocity"—the old people are always recipients whose need and obligation to repay are seen as unnecessary and difficult to satisfy. The system encourages their passivity, which deepens their dependency and helps to explain why they are often perceived as children. Offering concrete suggestions for improving the quality of nursing-home life, Uneasy Endings will find a broad audience among those who work with the aged.
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno Publisher: Camden House ISBN: 1571135111 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
When John Updike died in 2009, tributes from the literary establishment were immediate and fulsome. However, no one reading reviews of Updike's work in the late 1960s would have predicted that kind of praise for a man who was known then as a brilliant stylist who had nothing to say. What changed? Why? And what is likely to be his legacy? These are the questions that Becoming John Updike pursues by examining the journalistic and academic response to his writings. Several things about Updike's career make a reception study appropriate. First, he was prolific: he began publishing fiction and essays in 1956, published his first book in 1958, and from then on, brought out at least one new book each year. Second, his books were reviewed widely - usually in major American newspapers and magazines, and often in foreign ones as well. Third, Updike quickly became a darling of academics; the first book about his work was published in 1967, less than a decade after his own first book. More than three dozen books and hundreds of articles of academic criticism have been devoted to Updike. The present volume will appeal to the continuing interest in Updike's writing among academics and general readers alike. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. Among other books, he has written volumes on Austen, Dickens, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold for Camden House's Literary Criticism in Perspective series.
Author: John Updike Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0307957179 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 529
Book Description
One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series—delivers the intimate, generous, insightful, and beautifully written collection he was compiling when he died. This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic. It concludes with a moving meditation on a modern world robbed of imagination—a world without religion, without art—and on the difficulties of faith in a disbelieving age. In between are previously uncollected stories and poems, a pageant of scenes from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, five late “golf dreams,” and several of Updike's commentaries on his own work. At the heart of the book are his matchless reviews—of John Cheever, Ann Patchett, Toni Morrison, William Maxwell, John le Carré, and essays on Aimee Semple McPherson, Max Factor, and Albert Einstein, among others. Also included are two decades of art criticism—on Chardin, El Greco, Blake, Turner, Van Gogh, Max Ernest, and more. Updike’s criticism is gossip of the highest order, delivered in an intimate and generous voice.
Author: John Updike
Author: John Updike
Author: John Updike
Author: William H. Pritchard
Author: John Updike
Author: Karl F. Zender
Author: Yoav Fromer
Author: Vigen Guroian
Author: Renée Rose Shield
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Author: John Updike