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 or implicitly, a wide range of propositional truth-claims, of which only a fraction assert literal causation. Other propositions are assertions about an epoch. "Romanticism," and its special importance to us, and about the validity of the contention of some Romantic writers that they are "prophets" or "seers"; others assert not only facts, but values—the great values in the poems of certain Romantic authors, especially Wordsworth, and the high moral values that constitute the general Romantic "ethos"; still other implicit propositions even undertake to offer justifiable, if partial, answers to such questions as who we now are, where we are, where we came from, and what all this means. The basic mode of "proof" employed for this mixed bag of assertions is their incorporation into a story—more specifically, into a story made up of many stories, in which we can distinguish, within the overarching narrative, a number of middle-sized "novellas" and a great many "short stories"; and the book as a whole requires that the reader enter into its "narrative world" and be convinced that "all of this happened—this story is true," as a necessary condition for being persuaded of the soundness of the truth-claims and value-claims that the narrative implicates.
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