M. H. Abrams Critical Essay | Critical Essay by M. H. Abrams

Critical Essay by M. H. Abrams

Wayne Booth is quite right [see excerpt above]: for all my interest in the methods of literary criticism, I say nothing about method in my two historical books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism. The reason for my silence on this issue is simple: these books were not written with any method in mind. Instead they were conceived, researched, worked out, put together, pulled apart, and put back together, not according to a theory of valid procedures in such under-takings, but by intuition. I relied, that is, on my sense of rightness and wrongness, of doubt and assurance, of deficiencies and superfluities, of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. (p. 176)

I confess that I was taken aback to discover, in Booth's just analysis, what a strange book Natural Supernaturalism is, and how extraordinary are the claims it presumes to make on its readers. It involves, explicitly...
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