History and value - Frank Kermode

In this work, the author returns to the literature of his youth to ask why we appear to have forgotten how powerful it seemed in a time of economic crisis and imminent world war.;He begins with a study of bourgeois left-wing writing in England and to a lesser extent the United States in the 1930s. He examines the causes of literary neglect and the connection between a book and its historical context.;Succeeding chapters discuss some left-wing novelists, eg Edward Upward and Lewis Jones and their response to the crises and political myths of the decade. Kermode also examines the "committed" work of the left-wing bourgeois poets; he questions whether, under the influence of George Orwell and the later recantations of the poets themselves, we have too easily accepted low valuations of their work.;The first section ends with a re-evaluation of Auden's political poetry. The second part considers the problem of value in work belonging to a period earlier than one's own. The Marxist approach is examined and also canon- and period-formation.;The last chapter concentrates on the most recent attempt to make these issues manageable, namely, postmodernism which rejects all notions of wholeness and speaks of a catastrophic break with the past.