{"product_id":"9780226838069-action-without-hope","title":"Action without Hope","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eVictorian Literature after Climate Collapse\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA study of how writers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot’s characters in \u003ci\u003eMiddlemarch \u003c\/i\u003eor the doomed lovers of \u003ci\u003eWuthering Heights\u003c\/i\u003e, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e To answer this question, Hensley shows that nineteenth-century writers and artists devised new ways to understand action—and hope. They rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. They turned away from logical proofs and direct argumentation and instead called on aesthetic technologies like sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches, and vast, multiplot novels, finding scope for action not at the level of the theme or the thesis but in gestures and details. Ranging from J. M. W. Turner’s painterly technique to Emily Brontë’s dreamlike fragments (and reading along the way works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Berryman, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti), Hensley’s study makes an important contribution to Victorian studies and the environmental humanities.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55946755932534,"sku":"9780226838069","price":35.51,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_34938346.jpg?v=1752816055","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9780226838069-action-without-hope","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}