In this sequel to his Romantic Consciousness, John Beer discusses further questionings of human consciousness: both the degree to which Dickens's conscious dramatizing differs from the
subconscious workings of his psyche and the exploration of subliminal consciousness by nineteenth-century psychical researchers. Discussions of questions of "Being" by thinkers such as
Heidegger, Sartre and Havel are accompanied by the assertion that creative writers such as Woolf and Lawrence, followed by Hughes and Plath, showed a deeper debt than philosophical
contemporaries to their Romantic predecessors.
