Richard E. Brantley is Alumni Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Florida, where, from 1969 to 2011, he taught courses in Romanticism, the History of Criticism, and the Bible as Literature. He hibernates in Gainesville, Florida, and rusticates in Zirconia, North Carolina. He gladly teaches, and gladly learns from, his fellow retirees. He still explores the realistic, yet hopeful, give-and-take between science and religion during the long Romantic Movement from roughly 1770 to 1870. Transatlantic Trio shows him warming to his subject at every crucial stage of its development.
In this treasure trove of literary commentary, Richard Brantley distills his decades of inquiry into the dynamic religious, scientific, and poetic forces that sustained an amazingly fruitful strain of Anglo-American Romanticism. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Tennyson, Emerson, and Dickinson play key roles in his argument, along with Locke, Wesley, Edwards, Darwin, and Brantleys of multiple generations. In their creative blendings of empiricism with evangelicalism, the writers featured here experimented with subtleties of both/and logic that challenge today's either/or reductionism. These articles, book chapters, personal writings, and reviews document energetic, sustained grappling with thinkers from the Enlightenment to the current literary scene, all treated with Brantley's characteristic insight, intensity, congeniality, and verve. As the humorous cover drawing of thirteen writer-thinkers aboard a railroading handcar suggests, Transatlantic Trio engages its readers on Brantley's adventurous scholarly excursion, "a back-and- forth that gets somewhere." -Jane Donahue Eberwein, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, Oakland University These essays speak to the way Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian thinkers created a Venn diagram out of an opposition that still nibbles at the soul (to paraphrase Dickinson) of today's postmodern world: science vs. religion. Of the many strategies the Romantics offer us to overcome the Manichean duality that runs rampant today are the flexibility of method over the rigidity of system as well as the multiple perspectives of "both/and logic" over the singular vision of "either/or logic." In terms of literary criticism and history, these methods show us the benefits and necessity of moving beyond the single-nation formulations of Romanticism towards a comparative approach. By examining transatlantic influence and literatures as hierarchical, scholars of Transatlantic Romanticism have unwittingly embraced the very duality they are trying to deconstruct. Brantley's methodology levels these fields to remove the competitive poetics and politics that emerged in the wake of the American Revolution and still maintains a foothold. His application of these strategies to present-day Western thought expands this book beyond a work of criticism to a philosophy that overrides the binary coding of a digital age. He ties "the transatlantic trio of empiricism, evangelicalism, and Romanticism together" in new and compelling ways: the collected essays and book reviews are tesserae that together form a mosaic, a more complete scholarly picture of Anglo-American Romanticism than previously existed. The book ends with a powerful autobiographical epilogue that testifies to the transcendent methods of Anglo-American Romanticism to help us make sense of not only the 18th-to-21st centuries, but also of our own lives, the antiphony of internal and external worlds that composes our thoughts and the "music of humanity." -Joel Pace, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
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