Hope

Most of us regard hope as a good thing, but ancient writers often viewed it with suspicion. They saw it as a distraction from the present, a source of irrational and self-defeating thinking, and even a kind of presumption against the gods. This book asks how much of that old criticism still applies. It traces our favorable attitude toward hope to a progressive political tradition rooted in the French Revolution, to strands of Romantic literature, and to the influence of the Abrahamic faiths.

Adam Potkay surveys the arguments for and against hope in literature from antiquity to the present. Rather than confining himself to one body of writing, he places poems, plays and novels in conversation with works of philosophy, theology and political theory, drawing on several fields at once.

The result is a new study of a literary debate that has lasted for centuries, one that weighs what hope offers against the risks it carries.