Product Description: 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...read more

A fourth collection of fiction works includes the complete texts of The Other House, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age.

Product Description: 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...read more

The English Literatures of America redefines colonial American literatures, sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana. The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Many texts are collected here for the first time; others are recognized masterpieces of the canon--both British and American--that can now be read in their Atlantic context. By emphasizing the culture of empire and by representing a transatlantic dialogue, The English Literatures of America allows a new way to understand colonial literature both in the United States and abroad. (view table of contents)

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Book by Jehlen, Myra