My Natural Methodism: Experience Becomes Words

Richard Brantley’s culminating monograph knits intellectual and spiritual autobiography with literary criticism. His measuring of faith in experience (empiricism) versus the experience of faith (evangelicalism)—fostered by parents steeped in literature—prefigured his career-long approach. A combination of personal commitment and professional dynamism sets a model for subjective as well as objective interpretation. Grappling with the sources of both taste and judgment seems called for in these dangerous times. Brantley’s memoir/lit-crit hybrid delivers art and life alike.

What Others Think About the Book

In this characteristically generous-spirited, intellectually energetic new book, Richard Brantley pays tribute to family members, teachers, and authors who inspired his life’s intellectual-spiritual journey. Borrowing his title phrase from Charles Lamb’s review of Wordsworth’s “The Excursion,” Brantley reflects on how “natural methodism” accounts for science/faith conjunctions in Anglo-American writing, with special emphasis on Romantic and post-Romantic writers Wordsworth, Emerson, and Dickinson while applying his thesis to a host of later poets and novelists including Eliot, Auden, and Marilynne Robinson. In this time of STEM dominance in academia and valuation of curricula chiefly for immediate job prospects, Brantley makes a powerful case for literature’s enduring impact. And he does so with joy and gratitude.

Jane Eberwein, Distinguished Professor of English Emerita,
Department of English, Oakland University

My Natural Methodism is Richard Brantley’s eighth book. It is an autobiography rich with literary criticism, its pages warm with references to the signatures of his life and his reading. His heartfelt intelligence is a gift for thoughtful readers to examine repeatedly. They will mark their place in the book and think about their own lives, their meanderings, intellectual and otherwise.

Samuel F. Pickering, Jr., Professor Emeritus,
Department of English, University of Connecticut, Storrs

In My Natural Methodism: Experience Becomes Words, Richard E. Brantley culminates his “career-long quest for aesthetic understanding” of the Romantic influence in Anglo-American culture. He does so by deftly interweaving autobiography with scholarly analysis, thereby incorporating personal experience in what he variously describes as a “memoir/lit-crit hybrid.” He seeks nothing less than the “disciplinary re-enchantment” needed to combat the current decline of the humanities. The book brings both/and logic to academic writing that Brantley sees as too narrowly devoted to objectivity, at the expense of the subjective life blood of literature and the arts. Thus, intertwining formative years with professional expertise, and gracing his hybrid with humor and humility, Brantley elegantly manages his dialogue with the rich Anglo-American tradition of science, religion, and literature.

Paul Crumbley, Professor Emeritus,
Department of English, Utah State University