Nathan Hensley for “Action Without Hope”

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.

Nathan K. Hensley lives in Silver Spring with his wife and two daughters. He is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in English at Georgetown University. His work and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature, environmental humanities, critical theory, and the novel. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford 2016), and co-editor of two books: Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham 2019) and The Barbara Johnson Collective (Northwestern, forthcoming). His other writing has appeared in various scholarly journals as well as outlets like e-flux and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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