A great snapshot of Frank Kermode in full-ranging critic mode: moving between modernism, literature, painting, censorship, criticism and individual writers without flinching.

Collected from essays written between 1958 and 1970, Modern Essays includes substantial pieces on Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Samuel Beckett, Sartre and the anti-novel, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark, alongside essays on modernism itself, obscenity and the public interest, and contemporary criticism.

What makes the collection useful now is Kermode’s willingness to treat “the modern” as a problem, looking at what modernism claims is new, what it quietly inherits, and what happens when artistic rebellion itself hardens into convention. The Benjamin essay is especially interesting in retrospect: Kermode is writing at the point when Benjamin’s reputation in the English-speaking literary world is rapidly expanding, trying to determine exactly what kind of critic he is and why his strange mode of reading matters. A very good book for anyone interested in twentieth-century literary culture from inside the argument rather than after the dust settled.

Fontana / William Collins Sons & Co., London, 1971. First Fontana edition. Paperback. Light rubbing and shelf wear to wrappers, with minor edge and cor from what is visible; binding firm. Very good condition for age.