Another was Maria Monk's "Awful Disclosures, " a sensational penny-dreadful which pretended to laybare the secrets of the lurid life behind the walls of a 19th century convent.
Two years later, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he laid the foundations of his reputation in America with a bold new way to approach literary texts and laybare their ideological presuppositions.
He doubled back toward Cambridge on a roundabout and pulled into a lay-by off the highway, a place of oily, littered grass with a kiosk on worn bare ground which sold hot dogs and burgers to lorry drivers.