Hope for us has a positive connotation. Yet it was criticized in classical antiquity as a distraction from the present moment, as the occasion for irrational and self-destructive thinking, and as a presumption against the gods. To what extent do arguments against hope today remain useful? If hope sounds to us like a good thing, that reaction stems from a progressive political tradition grounded in the French Revolution, aspects of Romantic literature and the influence of the Abrahamic faiths. Ranging both wide and deep, Adam Potkay examines the cases for and against hope found in literature from antiquity to the present. Drawing imaginatively on several fields and creatively juxtaposing poetry, drama, and novels alongside philosophy, theology and political theory, the author brings continually fresh insights to a subject of perennial interest. This is a bold and illuminating new treatment of a long-running literary debate as complex as it is compelling.

Compelling treatment of a question pervading literature from antiquity: when is hope a good thing and when is it not?

Although ancient hope has attracted much scholarly attention in the past, this is the first book-length discussion of the topic. The introduction offers a systematic discussion of the semantics of Greek elpis and Latin spes and addresses the difficult question of whether hope -ancient and modern- is an emotion. On the other hand, the 16 contributions deal with specific aspects of hope in Greek and Latin literature, history and art, including Pindar's poetry, Greek tragedy, Thucydides, Virgil's epic and Tacitus' Historiae. The volume also explores from a historical perspective the hopes of slaves in antiquity, the importance of hope for the enhancement of stereotypes about the barbarians, and the depiction of hope in visual culture, providing thereby a useful tool not only for classicist but also for philosophers, cultural historians and political scientists.

Introduction: practices of hope and tales of disenchantment -- Nation: I like America -- Liberalism: Richard Chase's liberal allegories -- Humanism: the cant of pessimism and Newton Arvin's queer humanism -- Symbolism: the queerness of symbols

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age argues that late nineteenth-century US fiction grapples with and helps to conceptualize the disagreeable feelings that are both a threat to citizens' agency and an inescapable part of the emotional life of democracy--then as now. In detailing the corruption and venality for which the period remains known, authors including Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Adams, and Helen Hunt Jackson evoked the depressing inefficacy of reform, the lunatic passions of the mob, and the revolting appetites of lobbyists and office seekers. Readers and critics of these Washington novels, historical romances, and satiric romans a clef have denounced these books' fiercely negative tone, seeing it as a sign of cynicism and elitism. Not Quite Hope argues, in contrast, that their distrust of politics is coupled with an intense investment in it: not quite apathy, but not quite hope. Chapters examine both common and idiosyncratic forms of political emotion, including 'crazy love', disgust, cynicism, 'election fatigue', and the myriad feelings of hatred and suspicion provoked by the figure of the hypocrite. In so doing, the book corrects critics' too-narrow focus on 'sympathy' as the American novel's model political emotion. We think of reform novels as fostering feeling for fellow citizens or for specific causes. This volume argues that Gilded Age fiction refocuses attention on the unstable emotions that continue to shape our relation to politics as such.

"There is no question that David Harvey's work has been one of the most important, influential, and imaginative contributions to the development of human geography since the Second World War. . . . His readings of Marx are arresting and original--a remarkably fresh return to the foundational texts of historical materialism."--Derek Gregory, author of Geographical Imaginations

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History suggests a unique approach to the inner lifeand its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gorman charts the emergence of our contemporaryidea of worry in the Victorian era and its establishment, after the First World War,as a feature of modernity. For some writers between the Wars, worry was the "diseaseof the age." Worrying examines the everyday kind of worry-the fearful, non-pathological, andusually hidden questioning about uncertain futures. It shows worry to be a naturalcompanion in a world where we try to live by reason and believe we have the right tochoose, finding in the worrier a peculiarly contemporary sufferer whose mental lifeis not only exceptionally familiar, but also deeply strange. Offering an intimately personal account of an all-too-common human experience, and of a word that slips in and out of ordinary conversation so often that it has become invisible in its familiarity,Worrying explores how the modern world has shaped our everyday anxieties.

A New York Times Notable Book 2012 The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: no one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn’t quite working out that way for Kugel… His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won’t stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one Kugel bought, and when, one night, he discovers history—a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history—hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse. Hope: A Tragedy is a hilarious and haunting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.