James Joyce: Hope, Form, and Future argues that hope is an overlooked yet central term for understanding Joyce. Joyce has often been read in terms of individual and collective political paralysis and hopelessness. At times, he has also been described as endorsing certain political visions or programs. But a full consideration of the concept of hope helps to complicate these views and to present a Joyce who thinks more agilely about the future, possibility, and politics than has been sufficiently recognized. It argues that Joyce's texts, as early as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , are not directed toward specific political goals, but are rather extraordinarily open to political futures that cannot necessarily be named or known in advance; indeed, these texts are of value in part because they encourage and can help readers to imagine such unimaginable futures.In addition to this, it also charts the ways in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake develop a formal technique of spatializing hope. In doing so, it offers some suggestive pictures of what Joyce might look like beyond the limitations of negative critique and even after the inevitable exhaustion of the current literary historicist project, which often asks us to look back to the past rather than forward to the future.