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.