Doctrine and Difference shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in this period. The colonialist writers, in Colacurcio's view, attempted to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment.

Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, Doctrine and Difference shows how these works are in many ways the literary remnants of Puritanism.