Crusoe's Secret: : The Aesthetics of Dissent - Tom Paulin

Condition : Very Good.
Faber & Faber, 2008, Medium-format Paperback - Literature - 400pp. ISBN 9780571221165.
This book is a wide-ranging collection of essays on major authors and texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. More than a loose gathering, it offers a series of explorations and readings in the culture of English dissent, whether focussed on canonical works - Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa - or moving between epic and novel, lyric, tract and drama.
The author engages with the great dissenting voices from Bunyan to D. H. Lawrence, and he casts new light on others - such as Clare or Kipling or Hopkins - whose work was touched by dissent, often in secretly generative or transformative ways. The Radical tradition has long been understood as integral to the making of the English working class, but the author restores a sense of how vital to middle-class print-culture were the civic, discursive and utopian intuitions of Dissent.
This book continues the investigations of Day-Star of Liberty, the author's previous study of William Hazlitt and his milieu, and it fans out to include salient Irish examples: Sheridan and Synge, Yeats, Joyce and Heaney.