Frank Kermode returns to the literature of his youth to ask why we appear to have forgotten how urgent and powerful it seemed in a time of economic crisis and imminent world war. The general questions suggested by the title are answered first by a study of bourgeois left wing literature in the1930s - including a case study of a forgotten novel of the period (Stephen Haggard's Nya, OPB, 1988) - and then by a consideration of the problem of value in work belonging to a period earlier than one's own. 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.
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