ABOUT THIS BOOK

A study of how writers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action.

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 Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, 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?

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nathan K. Hensley is professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty and coeditor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. He was born in Fresno, California, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

REVIEWS

“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 Brontë, 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 Brontë, 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."

— James Metcalf, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

“Hensley is conversant with such a range of idioms, moves so deftly between them, that he begins to articulate--or rather perform--a multi-voiced analysis that--and I can't quite figure out how he does it-—sustains the resistant language and the dominant at once to create what is almost a third form, mobilizing power when it is needed but in the end against itself to create another possibility for academics. . . . This is a beautiful, breathtaking book that is also an invitation to solidarity in this moment of climate precarity.”

— Barbara Leckie, Review19

“Hensley’s Action Without Hope intervenes forcefully in Victorian studies and the environmental humanities by arguing that nineteenth-century texts register the contradictions of extractive modernity not through grand thematic pronouncements but through minute formal disturbances. . . . What Hensley offers—brilliantly—is a theory of Victorian form attuned to rupture, damage, and the tiny events in which the limits of capitalist modernity become legible.”

— M.A. Miller, Nineteenth Century Contexts

“Hensley argues, largely from a Marxist viewpoint, that any hope that a reversal of climate disaster will succeed within the ‘extractive order’ of corporate capitalism is unrealistic. Action without Hope claims that we cannot expect large-scale change, but we can anticipate ‘elaboration at small scale' . . . . Recommended.”

— L. A. Brewer, Choice

“Action Without Hope tells the uneven story of fossil-fueled modernity and its contiguous mental grammars. . . . Bringing fresh attention to oft-overlooked details in some of the era’s greatest works, Hensley’s innovative close readings locate models for counterbourgeois thought, solidarity, and action from within an extractive regime, models that speak to our contemporary need for new forms of action and hope in the wake of irreversible planetary change. . . . In Hensley’s adroit interpretive hands, these great Victorian works come alive as prescient models of minor action from within the same extractive nightmare we seek to wake from.”

— Kristin Rose, Novel: A Forum on Fiction

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Wuthering Heights

Middlemarch

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