Chinese Scholars' Perspective on John Updike's "Rabbit Tetralogy"

Abstract

Updike's masterpiece, using skillful realism, succeeded in drawing a panoramic picture of the American society from the 1950s to the early 1990s in the " Rabbit Tetralogy ." Updike strives to reflect the changes in contemporary American social culture for nearly half a century from the "rabbit" Harry, the everyman of the American society and the life experiences of his ordinary family. " Rabbit Tetralogy " truly reflects the living conditions of the contradictions of contemporary Americans: endless pursuit of free life or independent self and the embarrassment and helplessness of it; the customary life and hedonism under the traditional values, the intense collision of self-indulgent lifestyles inspired by thought. The endless pursuit of so-called freedom and self is bred. As the greatest masterpiece, John Updike's " Rabbit Tetralogy " shows readers nearly half a century of the American’s social life, and provides literary critics listless raw material as well, and becomes a beloved apple in the mind’s eye of Chinese scholars. This paper, adopting a comparative method, combs the historical clue of the study in the past three decades, two different phases and the respective research results and the main viewpoints are summarized and presented. Also this paper probes into the main problems in this field, i.e. the lack of sufficient research perspectives, relative research redundancy and the lack of communication between home and abroad, etc. and engages to point out the direction and tendency of future research. Further studies are suggested to conduct via literary space theory, etc. to enhance the study of " Rabbit Tetralogy ".