Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College. His previous books include The Culture of Interpretation: Christian Faith and the Postmodern World, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, and The Promise of Hermeneutics.

Roger Lundin's 'story of nineteenth-century sources and twenty-first-century consequences' narrates the American disenchantment of nature and the ensuing rise (and fall) of experience with admirable subtlety; along the way offering a devastating deconstruction of that ongoing philosophical champion of experience, pragmatism.

• IntroductionChapter 1: The Preferences of EdenChapter 2: Delivered to the Dream: Emerson and the Pathways of PragmatismChapter 3: Reading the Blooming Confusion: William James and the Theology of ExperienceChapter 4: Diminished Things: Literature and the Disenchantment of the WorldChapter 5: Divining LivesChapter 6: Intentional IroniesChapter 7: The Truth Beyond Method: Fiction at the Limits of ExperienceConclusion