Christopher Castiglia is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst; Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States; and, with Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. He is co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and co-editor of its journal J19.

"The Practices of Hopeis a brilliant and bracing polemic that addresses the fraught conditions of literary criticism as practiced in the academy today. Both a diagnosis of our current situation and a timely and provocative recommendation about what we might be doing otherwise, Christopher Castiglia shows a way forward that combines pleasure and politics, exemplifying the very thing he advocates." - Christopher Looby,series editor of Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century "The Practices of Hopeis an exhilarating book.Astute, compelling, and lucidly written, the book argues that scholars no longer practice the open embrace of imaginative idealism that the founders of American Studies used as a method of & critical hope. Offering a canny study of the mid-century criticism that is the foundation of the discipline, Castiglia provides an important corrective to the way we currently approach our work as scholars and thinkers." - Nancy Bentley,author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920

Christopher Castiglia is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst; Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States; and, with Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. He is co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and co-editor of its journal J19.

"The Practices of Hopeis a brilliant and bracing polemic that addresses the fraught conditions of literary criticism as practiced in the academy today. Both a diagnosis of our current situation and a timely and provocative recommendation about what we might be doing otherwise, Christopher Castiglia shows a way forward that combines pleasure and politics, exemplifying the very thing he advocates." - Christopher Looby,series editor of Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century "The Practices of Hopeis an exhilarating book.Astute, compelling, and lucidly written, the book argues that scholars no longer practice the open embrace of imaginative idealism that the founders of American Studies used as a method of & critical hope. Offering a canny study of the mid-century criticism that is the foundation of the discipline, Castiglia provides an important corrective to the way we currently approach our work as scholars and thinkers." - Nancy Bentley,author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920

Christopher Castiglia is Distinguished Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst; Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States; and, with Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. He is co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and co-editor of its journal J19.

"The Practices of Hopeis a brilliant and bracing polemic that addresses the fraught conditions of literary criticism as practiced in the academy today. Both a diagnosis of our current situation and a timely and provocative recommendation about what we might be doing otherwise, Christopher Castiglia shows a way forward that combines pleasure and politics, exemplifying the very thing he advocates." - Christopher Looby,series editor of Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century "The Practices of Hopeis an exhilarating book.Astute, compelling, and lucidly written, the book argues that scholars no longer practice the open embrace of imaginative idealism that the founders of American Studies used as a method of & critical hope. Offering a canny study of the mid-century criticism that is the foundation of the discipline, Castiglia provides an important corrective to the way we currently approach our work as scholars and thinkers." - Nancy Bentley,author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920