Reading Effectively at Remove

Seminar discussion today brought up the question of how it can be possible when reading fiction to capture the mind-set of a time now past and a culture now dead - since the reader's mind is entirely formed by its own culture, distant in place or time or both.
Specifically, it was asked how it can possible for a contemporary Western reader (possessing what I call triumphant Whig mentality) to read Ford Madox Ford's literary representation of "the last Tory" sympathetically, when Ford was purposely portraying a type cut off from our present by the absolute fissure that was World War One.

Now, this post from my Japanese literature course presents one way of approach, mapped by C.S. Lewis in his Discarded Image.

The concept from Romanticism that escaped me on the spot in seminar, and which I offered as a solution to this problem, is Keats' negative capability (I had Eliot's "objective correlative" in mind -- pertinent to Parade's End in another context -- blocking Mr. Keats from my mental foreground!) Here are the pertinent sentences from a letter of Keats':

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. [My emphases.]