02270nam a22002177a 4500 20260807160650.0 260807b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d 9780226838069 : Raghav Books Pvt. Ltd. : 2/25 First Floor, Arun House, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi : 3114 : 3/8/2026 823.8 HEN Hensley, Nathan K. Action Without Hope : Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse. / Nathan K. Hensley. , Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2025. 359p. : 24cm. 2367 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. Literature Victorian Literature Nathan K. Hensley. BOOK 70646 70646 0 0 ddc 0 0 SNUL SNUL 2026-08-07 Raghav Books Pvt. Ptd. 2367.00 0 823.8 HEN 31661 2026-08-07 16:07:13 2026-08-07 BOOK