History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures 1987 - Hardcover

Kermode, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198123817 ISBN 13: 9780198123811

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1988

Synopsis

Frank Kermode here returns to the literature of his youth to ask why we seem to have forgotten how urgent and powerful this literature was during a time of economic crisis and imminent world war. First examining bourgeois left-wing writing in England in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, Kermode explores the causes of literary neglect and the nature of the bond between a book and its historical context. He goes on to discuss left-wing novelists and their response to the crises and political myths of the decade and the "committed" work of left-wing bourgeois poets, including Auden, MacNeice, Spender, Upward, Wyndham Lewis, and the Welsh miner and author Lewis Jones. The second part of the book draws on Marxist and postmodernist criticism, and strategies of canon- and period-formation, to address the more general question of how literature dies or survives and how we go about deciding whether to attribute value to it.

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Reviews

The literature of the Thirties is dominated by political issues with which few readers today can sympathize. Accepting this, Kermode suggests in Part 1 of this book that it is also "a love-story, almost a story of forbidden love," in which bourgeois writers had to discover a proper, though always uneasy, relationship with the Other: the proletariat. Part 2, more theoretical, considers Marxist and post-modernist conceptions of value as well as the role of history in determining literary survival. Originally presented as the Clarendon and Northcliffe lectures, Kermode's book is always lucid, often brilliantly insightful. Essential for scholars and students of the period. Donald P. Kaczvinsky, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198123817
• ISBN 13: 9780198123811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160