Action without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse

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. Li...