000			02270nam a22002177a 4500
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020			_a9780226838069
028			_a: Raghav Books Pvt. Ltd. _b: 2/25 First Floor, Arun House, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi _c: 3114 _d: 3/8/2026
082			_a823.8 HEN
100			_aHensley, Nathan K.
245			_aAction Without Hope _b: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse. _c/ Nathan K. Hensley.
260			_a, Chicago _b: University of Chicago Press _c, 2025.
300			_a359p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b2367
520			_aWhat 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.
650			_aLiterature
650			_aVictorian Literature
700			_aNathan K. Hensley.
942			_cBOOK
999			_c70646 _d70646