description: "Crusoe's Secret" 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. Tom Paulin 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 Paulin restores a sense of how vital to middle-class print-culture were the civic, discursive and utopian intuitions of Dissent. "Crusoe's Secret" continues the investigations of "Day-Star of Liberty", Paulin's previous study of William Hazlitt and his milieu, and it fans out to include salient Irish Sheridan and Synge, Yeats, Joyce and Heaney. Tom Paulin's most intricately plotted collection of essays so far, even as it avoids any single plot or overarching idea, "Crusoe's Secret" moves through a landscape of example and anecdote, of minute particulars and things 'hidden in daylight'. Above all, in its marriage of a historical vision to close critical readings, "Crusoe's Secret" locates Paulin himself in a line of exemplary readers, including William Empson and the late Edward Said, for whom biographical and historical awareness complement aesthetic enquiry, and in whose awakened rhythms can be heard the speaking voice of prose.
language: English
title: Crusoe's Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent
titlecomplete: Crusoe's Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent
characters: Daniel Defoe
ratings_count: 3
publisher: Faber and Faber