Books by Nathan Wolff
Nathan Wolff is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department at Tufts University. He is the author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age (2019). His essays—on authors including Helen Hunt Jackson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Frank Norris—have appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. He is currently working on two new books tentatively titled Inhuman Environments and Dirty Jobs. The first considers how nineteenth-century American novels illuminate the political effects of the nonhuman world; the second looks to nineteenth-century literature for lessons about the formation of, and alternatives to, the American work ethic.
Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age
by Nathan Wolff
“Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age provides a literary prehistory of today’s emotional politics: the cynicism and exhaustion of democratic life in an age of inequality, corruption, and partisan acrimony.”
Interviews with Nathan Wolff
The Best 19th-Century American Novels, recommended by Nathan Wolff
In the novels of the 19th century, the United States comes alive with all its contradictions and complications. Nathan Wolff, a professor of English at Tufts and author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age, introduces us to his picks of the best 19th-century American novels, including two works of historical fiction and a memoir that influenced the novel form.
