Myra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for Jehlen, the threshold of the real. It is here, she argues, that the central paradoxes of the American project become clear self-reliance and responsibility, universal equality and the pursuit of empire, writing from the heart and representing shared values and ideas. Developing these paradoxes to their utmost tension, American writers often produce penetrating critiques of American society without puncturing its basic myths. For...
Myra Jehlen's aim in these essays is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is ...
This anthology surveys the emergence of Anglo-American cultures in the first dramatic period of the European empires. It includes Francis Bacon, Adam Smith, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope as well as Wheatley and Edwards.
This anthology surveys the emergence of Anglo-American cultures in the first dramatic period of the European empires. It includes Francis Bacon, Adam ...
"The English Literatures of America" redefines colonial American literatures. Sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana, This anthology survey the emergence of Anglo-American cultures in the first dramatic period of the European empires. The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Placing the literary culture of the settlements in the context of other colonies as well as the growing cosmopolitan culture of the British empire itself, this lively reader contains numerous...
"The English Literatures of America" redefines colonial American literatures. Sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana...
In exploring the origins and characterof the American liberal tradition, MyraJehlen begins with the proposition thatthe decisive factor that shaped the European settlers' idea of "America" or the"American" was material rather than conceptual--it was the physical fact of theland. European settlers came to a continent on which they had no history, bringing the ideology of liberal individualism, which they projected onto the land itself. They believed the continent proclaimedthat individuals were born in natureand freely made their own society. Aninsurgent ideology in Europe, this ideaworked...
In exploring the origins and characterof the American liberal tradition, MyraJehlen begins with the proposition thatthe decisive factor that shaped...
Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbo, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita,...
Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively ...
