Action without Hope

Reviews / Votes

"I was on the edge of my seat as I read Action without Hope. Hensley is such a magnificent stylist and invigorating thinker that reading his work is an exhilarating experience despite the difficult topics he explores. Action without Hope exposes a nineteenth-century literary record of despoliation, exploitation, and rapine, but the saving grace of Hensley's account is the authors themselves-visionaries who saw dark, Satanic mills multiplying around them and improvised various strategies of writerly opposition. Many of these authors are women, and the book's exquisite close readings of the work of writers like Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti challenge masculinist conceptions of action and put forth other modes of response to environmental destruction, modes from which we might learn today. Eagerly anticipated on the strength of Hensley's earlier work, Action without Hope is a worthy successor to Forms of Empire and Ecological Form. The ambitious range of its arguments and methods mean that its effects will be felt on many different fronts and in many different registers, impacting not just discussions of the authors and texts that Hensley treats, but also the methods and styles of argument that we use in literary studies." * Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis * "Ambitious in its critical and theoretical range, Action without Hope turns to an archive of major Victorian texts to address the ecological crises that we witness today. Hensley argues that the extractive capitalist social organization leading to our present crisis has been in development since the industrial era and shows how the literary archive challenges common ideas about feeling and agency in relation to ecological disaster. Action without Hope is a bracing, deeply researched book that supercharges a vibrant scholarly conversation." * Benjamin Morgan, University of Chicago * "I have finally found a critical holy grail in Nathan Hensley's stunning Action without Hope. Through close readings of Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and others, the book challenges its readers to immerse themselves in the 'fossil-fueled lifeworld' of the nineteenth century. But just as we might acclimate to one line in a late poem by Christina Rossetti, Hensley wrenches us back into the futility of present 'solutionist' rhetorics of individual actions aimed at '"beating" mass extinction'. While extremely generous in its engagement with theorists and critics of all stripes, the meat of this book is Hensley's relentless pursuit of the ground zero of the texts themselves." -- Karen Pinkus * Critical Inquiry * "Famously, poetry makes nothing happen-nor should we expect it to, according to Action without Hope: poetry is not responsible for fixing a broken world. Nathan K. Hensley nonetheless beautifully elaborates how much nineteenth-century poems, novels, and paintings can do within their narrow compass. This book is committed to an ethics of restraint, as a standard of attention to the technical details of artistic forms, but also a proportionate response to outsized disaster." * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *