Hope originally meant anticipation of what is to come and was related mostly to the material here-and-now or a religious dimension in the beyond. By the modern era at the latest, however, this reading becomes problematic. Instead, literature and philosophy develop conceptions of hope that are increasingly characterized by ambivalence and paradox, conceptions that evoke the future in a mode of uncertainty.

Agnes Bidmon, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.