In the latest issue of The London Magazine, Stuart Walton reviews Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History by Timothy Hampton, discussing it alongside Adam Potkay’s Hope: A Literary History. Click here to learn more about Hampton’s book. See the button to the left to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“In modern experience, cheerfulness is what one struggles to regain after finding its moral status as a goal in life to be suspect and flawed. It has migrated from the spiritual realm via the psychological to the purely aesthetic, and thence to modern homily, shedding existential ballast as it flew. Hampton teases out the internal contradiction in American society whereby buoyant spirits have become ‘a form of self-consolation, an affective tool that can reconcile you to drudgery’, and yet remain officially ‘the character trait of the rugged individualist’.”