review by Brian Charles Clark
Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson
by Richard Brantley
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
Richard E. Brantley’s Experience and Faith is a wide-ranging consideration of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, letters and prose fragments in the context of transatlantic Romanticism. The book is a thematically arranged exploration of Dickinson’s evangelical experientialist method. Brantley uses three broad themes in his approach to Dickinson’s work: “experimental trust” (chapter two), “nature methodized” (chapter three), and the “Romantic to Modern arc” (chapter four). Brantley situates these thematic concerns within deeply informed readings of Locke, Wesley and other nineteenth-century empiricists. I’ll return to these thematic considerations after first briefly describing the contextual ground within which he explores them. Read the rest of this entry »
“Snow-Balls have… their Arcs,” Thomas Pynchon’s fifth novel begins. Trying to calculate the arc of the narrative of Mason & Dixon is as difficult as the calculus involved in calculating the arc of a thrown snowball. It’s a huge book, not just in number of pages, but in ideas, both comic and profound, and in erudition.
