Readings at the edge of literature / Myra Jehlen

Includes bibliographical references and index

"Imitate Jesus and Socrates" The Making of a Good American -- J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur: A Monarcho-Anarchist in Revolutionary America -- The Novel and the Middle Class in America -- The Family Militant: Domesticity versus Slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin -- Banned in Concord: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Classic American Literature -- The Ties that Bind: Race and Sex in Puddn'head Wilson -- Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism -- Why Did the European Cross the Ocean? -- History before the Fact: The Underdetermined John Smith -- History beside the Fact: What We Learn from A True and Exact History of Barbadoes -- An Empire of One's Own: Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out -- Guggenheim in Bilbao

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.