"Hope" and "modernism" are two words that are not commonly linked. Moving from much-discussed negative affects to positive forms of feeling, Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature argues that they should be. This book contends that much of modernist writing and thought reveals a deeply held confidence about the future, one premised on the social power of art itself. In chapters ranging across a diverse array of canonical writers – Henry James, D.W. Griffith, H.D., Melvin Tolson, and Samuel Beckett – this text locates in their works an optimism linked by a common faith in the...