Introduction: The Contexts of Modernist Hope
Chapter One: The Image in the Mirror: Aesthetic Utility in Late James
Chapter Two: Screened Anxieties: Hope and Fear in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
Chapter Three: Unpredictable Texts: H.D.'s Grammar of Creation
Chapter Four: Recovering Democracy: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
Chapter Five: Refusing Silence: Art as Deferment in Waiting for Godot and Endgame
Coda: Legacies of Modernist Hope: Poetic Unknowing and the Call to Wonder.