Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse by Nathan K. Hensley (review)

Famously, poetry makes nothing happen—nor should we expect it to, according to Action without Hope: poetry is not responsible for fixing a broken world. Nathan K. Hensley nonetheless beautifully elaborates how much nineteenth-century poems, novels, and paintings can do within their narrow compass. This book is committed to an ethics of restraint, as a standard of attention to the technical details of artistic forms, but also a proportionate response to outsized disaster. Climate collapse is an overmastering idea, producing paralyzed despair or the hyperactivity of revolution. For Hensley, extremes of powerlessness and empowerment conceal more subdued forms of “collective action without expectation” (20), which may not controvert but can quietly contest calamity. Operating at this low level, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poems, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the poetry of Christina Rossetti, and paintings by J. M. W. Turner and William Berryman illustrate the capacity of art and literature to change the world, not all at once, but bit by bit.