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Abstract
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Political studies of literature are common, and Updike’s work has likewise received much attention by critics who are interested in political aspects of his fiction. This thesis seeks to study the political criticisms written on Updike’s fiction in order to present a taxonomy of political articles and to reveal the ways in which political approaches are combined with nonpolitical theories to present richer analyses of Updike’s fiction. For this purpose, the relevant political and non-political theories are explained, focusing on their most relevant concepts and techniques, and the selected critical writings are investigated in terms of the ways they furnish political readings of Updike’s fiction. Investigation on these articles reveals that they can be categorized according to their main approach into four groups, namely, postcolonial, feminist, New Historical and Marxist, drawing on such notions and techniques as Orientalism, hegemony, attentive reading, superstructure, ideological state apparatus, the Other and gender. Additionally, it is demonstrated that all these articles employ more than one theory and, in many cases, they draw on the nonpolitical theories of New Criticism and structuralism to enrich their critical interpretations. The findings of this study also suggest that postcolonial theory provides the most favorite foundation for the political criticisms of Updike’s work, especially with his novel Terrorist, because most of these selected articles have used this theory whether as their main approach or as their secondary approach.
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