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9780198831693

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"Full of splendid insight and erudition, Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age offers a striking new way to understand the literature of that raucous era. Tracing the negative emotions authors associated with the institutions of American politics, Nathan Wolff shows how disgust, depression, and cynicism can still express an undeclared refusal to passively accept democracy's failings and can become the ground for new political desires and negotiations. Wolff has written a timely and truly accomplished book. * Nancy Bentley, Donald T. Regan Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania * What better time than now to encounter a book that contends so scrupulously with ""an aversive attachment to politics"" in the American grain? With great theoretical agility — and through acute and vividly counterintuitive readings of post-bellum figures like Twain, Stowe, DuBois, and Helen Hunt Jackson — Nathan Wolff expands our conceptual vocabulary for thinking about political emotion, tuning us to affects that do not parse especially easily in the familiar grammars of sentimentality but that are not, his readings show, quite so ""anti-democratic"" as our histories of Gilded Age fiction have led us to believe. Not Quite Hope is an exemplary work of literary historicism, affect theory, and political imagination. * Peter Coviello, Professor of English, University of Illinois-Chicago * What does democracy feel like? Nathan Wolff's superb study lays bare the complex ambivalences of political emotion during America's first Gilded Age, a period with revealing correspondences to our own. Probing a diffuse set of ""almost-always-negative feelings"" that surrounded political activity during this anxious era — agitation, madness, repulsion, depression, suspicion, cynicism, and exhaustion — Not Quite Hope shows convincingly how the postbellum political novel yearned to engage with institutional democracy even as it recoiled from it. An essential book for understanding political affect both then and now. * William Gleason, Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies, Princeton University *"

Full of splendid insight and erudition, Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age offers a striking new way to understand the literature of that raucous era. Tracing the negative emotions authors associated with the institutions of American politics, Nathan Wolff shows how disgust, depression, and cynicism can still express an undeclared refusal to passively accept democracy's failings and can become the ground for new political desires and negotiations. Wolff has written a timely and truly accomplished book. * Nancy Bentley, Donald T. Regan Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania * What better time than now to encounter a book that contends so scrupulously with an aversive attachment to politics in the American grain? With great theoretical agility - and through acute and vividly counterintuitive readings of post-bellum figures like Twain, Stowe, DuBois, and Helen Hunt Jackson - Nathan Wolff expands our conceptual vocabulary for thinking about political emotion, tuning us to affects that do not parse especially easily in the familiar grammars of sentimentality but that are not, his readings show, quite so anti-democratic as our histories of Gilded Age fiction have led us to believe. Not Quite Hope is an exemplary work of literary historicism, affect theory, and political imagination. * Peter Coviello, Professor of English, University of Illinois-Chicago * What does democracy feel like? Nathan Wolff's superb study lays bare the complex ambivalences of political emotion during America's first Gilded Age, a period with revealing correspondences to our own. Probing a diffuse set of almost-always-negative feelings that surrounded political activity during this anxious era - agitation, madness, repulsion, depression, suspicion, cynicism, and exhaustion - Not Quite Hope shows convincingly how the postbellum political novel yearned to engage with institutional democracy even as it recoiled from it. An essential book for understanding political affect both then and now. * William Gleason, Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies, Princeton University *

What does democracy feel like? Nathan Wolff's superb study lays bare the complex ambivalences of political emotion during America's first Gilded Age, a period with revealing correspondences to our own. Probing a diffuse set of almost-always-negative feelings that surrounded political activity during this anxious era - agitation, madness, repulsion, depression, suspicion, cynicism, and exhaustion - Not Quite Hope shows convincingly how the postbellum political novel yearned to engage with institutional democracy even as it recoiled from it. An essential book for understanding political affect both then and now. * William Gleason, Hughes-Rogers Professor of English and American Studies, Princeton University * What better time than now to encounter a book that contends so scrupulously with an aversive attachment to politics in the American grain? With great theoretical agility - and through acute and vividly counterintuitive readings of post-bellum figures like Twain, Stowe, DuBois, and Helen Hunt Jackson - Nathan Wolff expands our conceptual vocabulary for thinking about political emotion, tuning us to affects that do not parse especially easily in the familiar grammars of sentimentality but that are not, his readings show, quite so anti-democratic as our histories of Gilded Age fiction have led us to believe. Not Quite Hope is an exemplary work of literary historicism, affect theory, and political imagination. * Peter Coviello, Professor of English, University of Illinois-Chicago * Full of splendid insight and erudition, Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age offers a striking new way to understand the literature of that raucous era. Tracing the negative emotions authors associated with the institutions of American politics, Nathan Wolff shows how disgust, depression, and cynicism can still express an undeclared refusal to passively accept democracy's failings and can become the ground for new political desires and negotiations. Wolff has written a timely and truly accomplished book. * Nancy Bentley, Donald T. Regan Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania *

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Nathan Wolff is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. His past work has appeared in the journals American Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and English Literary History.

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