"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 Literatureargues 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 necessity of artistic practice for cultural survival. In this way, the famously self-attentive nature of modernism becomes a means, for its central thinkers and artists, of reflecting on what DeJong calls aesthetic utility: the unpredictable, ungovernable capacity of the work of art to shape the future even while envisioning it.