Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future. Francis O'Gorman asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.

Francis O'Gorman is Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author or editor of 23 books, including Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is currently working on three separate projects: on Yeats, on London, and on Emily Brontë.

Introduction 1. Cultures of Memory 2. The Making of Modern Forgetting 3. Contemporary Cultures of Amnesia 4. Forgetfulness in Contemporary Cultural Narrative 5. Learning Pasts 6. The Problems of Forgetting National and Local Histories Acknowledgements References Index