Behind this change, Herrero Senes maintains, are the antibourgeois movement of surrealism, the return of a critical politics with the decline of Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, the increasing protagonism of the working class, the disenchantment of many writers with a modernization perceived as producing complacency, and the poverty that results from the 1929 financial crash.
However, Herrero Senes considers that the discrediting of the vanguard was unjust and has received insufficient scholarly attention.
The challenges that faced the vanguard are pursued in chapter 5, "Desafios." Herrero Senes rejects conceiving of the interwar literary paranoma in polarized terms as "pure" versus "revolutionary" to argue for the co-existence of multiple positions according to the degree to which individual writers considered literature should play a political role.
Rather than taking up any one of the subcategories he delineates--say, for instance, under the modal criterion, linguistic nihilism--and delving into it further, Senes keeps them all in mind as he next tackles reactions to nihilism (revisiting Nietzsche, et al) and investigates ways in which it might be overcome.
Juan Herrero Senes is, above all, extremely well read on the subject of nihilism.