“In an earlier dark time, Kenneth Burke famously called literature ‘equipment for living.’ In our own moment, John Brenkman’s Mood and Trope serves as a closely-reasoned and useful guide to the history of  philosophies of affect and the passions. Reading texts from the Renaissance to the present with his usual clarity and precision, Brenkman shows us how literature has extended and deepened the possibilities of feeling and knowledge of feeling alike. In the end he argues that practices of poiesis and learning have played, and can continue to play, a vital role not only in the preservation of democracy, but also, as we enter an era shadowed by the prospect of extinction, in human flourishing itself.”