Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Misty G. Anderson is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee and author of Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Longing to Believe: Methodism and Modernity1. Historicizing Methodism2. The New Man: Desire, Transformation, and the Methodist Body3. Words Made Flesh: Fanny Hill and the Language of Passion4. Actors and Ghosts: Methodism in the Theater of the Real5. "My Lord, My Love": The Performance of Public Intimacy and the Methodist Hymn6. A Usable Past: Reconciliation in Humphry Clinker and The Spiritual QuixoteAfterword: 1778 and BeyondNotesBibliographyIndex

The fruit of wide and perceptive reading, Imagining Methodism is not only forensically incisive, but (as one might expect from a Professor of English) written in a readable and pithy style with some nice turns of phrase. She has tapped and mastered a considerable range of relevant literature, historic and contemporary... Imagining Methodism brings refreshing and challenging insights to the area. -- Peter S. Forsaith Wesley and Methodist Studies Anderson's prose is witty, and she brings welcome rigor to a collection of squibs, rants, and sermons too often dismissed as incapable of sustaining serious thought. This is an important intervention- Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain will need to be reckoned with by all students of 'spirituality', enthusiasm', and 'secularity' in the long eighteenth century. -- Jasper Cragwall BARS Bulletin and Review ...[T]he range of sources Ms. Anderson brings to her study is impressive, as is her ability to navigate between the anti-Methodist literature and the philosophical discussions during the period. -- Brett C. McInelly The Scriblerian This is both a thoughtful and thought-provoking exploration, scrutinizing the ways in which perceptions of Methodism 'worked' in the British imagination... -- Jeremy Gregory Modern Literary Review Perhaps the highest praise I have for Anderson's worthy volume is that it prompts reflection on not just eighteenth- but also twenty-first-century strategies for performing secular statehood. Eighteenth-Century Life