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Redux (literary term)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Redux is a post-positive adjective meaning 'brought back, restored' (from Latin reducere, 'to bring back')[1] used in literature, film and video game titles.

History

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Works of literature using the word in the title include John Dryden's Astraea Redux (1662), "a poem on the happy restoration and return of His Sacred Majesty"; Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux (1873), the sequel to Phineas Finn (1867); and John Updike's Rabbit Redux (1971), the second in his sequence of novels about the character Rabbit Angstrom.

Rabbit Redux led to a return in the popularity of the word redux and, in Rabbit at Rest (1990), Rabbit Angstrom notices "a story ... in the Sarasota paper a week or so ago, headlined Circus Redux. He hates that word, you see it everywhere, and he doesn't know how to pronounce it. Like arbitrageur and perestroika."[2]

The term has been adopted by filmmakers to denote a new interpretation of an existing work by the restoration of previously removed material. For example Apocalypse Now Redux, which Francis Ford Coppola released in 2001, re-editing and extending his original 1979 movie.

The term has also been used by music producers to describe what is more often referred to as a remix or remaster.

References

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  1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary entry for "redux".
  2. ^ Rabbit at Rest, p.50