ABSTRACT
Post-modern literary theory made one feature its dissent from the "New Criticism", which had been rightly considered the product of literary modernism. This recovers an old battle in the memory of an older generation when the New Criticism was posed in reaction against social naturalists and literary Marxists during the decades of the twenties, thirties, and forties. Though cultural dissent remains the heritage of modernism, the post-modern generations absorbed it with effects so large that it penetrated most of the major arguing themes such as inter-textual narrativity, cultural-linguistic dominance over the text, the overriding importance of group power conflict for dramatic theme and resolution. Communities and groups express a context and so the sensibilities of both writer and reader are to be understood in that context. In those years of conflict some critics accused the new wave of theory from France of literary and moral nihilism.
