Undomesticated Dissent

In his Undomesticated Dissent, Curtis W. Freeman attempts to articulate a tradition of dissent present in early modern England and in America from the seventeenth century on that encouraged the formation of modern democracy through literary works informed by Christian theologies, diverse forms of “apocalypticism,” and a resistance to “domestication,” i.e., constraints on the individual conscience by established religion and coercive empire. Freeman discovered his three intellectual pillars for this tradition interred centrally in the historic burial ground for protestant nonconformists at Bunhill Fields in London. There Freeman found the monumental John Bunyan (1628–1688), Daniel Defoe (1660?–1731), and William Blake (1757–1827) and it is to their “classic texts of dissent”—The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Jerusalem—that he turns for paradigms of dissent from their respective eras, but also literary standards that “became instrumental in disseminating the message of the dissenting tradition far and wide” (pp. xiv-xvi). Thus, Freeman’s “extended argument” asserts that an analysis of the contexts and texts of these three men (as well as others such as Roger Williams, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Wendell Berry) should demonstrate a common expression of dissent (although with context-specific perspectives) that influenced the development of democracy in the modern era and that continues to provide models for Christianity and “the flourishing of free societies” through the message of resistance to “the powers of domestication” (p. xviii).

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