Writing to rule
Claude Rawson, 18 September 1980
Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism
by George Pocock.
Cambridge, 215 pp., £12.50, June 1980,0 521 22772 0 Show More
by George Pocock.
Cambridge, 215 pp., £12.50, June 1980,
‘The Rape of the Lock’ and its Illustrations 1714-1896
by Robert Halsband.
Oxford, 160 pp., £11.50, July 1980,0 19 812098 2 Show More
by Robert Halsband.
Oxford, 160 pp., £11.50, July 1980,
“... Was there such a thing as ‘Neo-Classicism’, outside the special sense of the term which art historians apply to a later period than the one over which students of literature lose so much of their composure? It seems to have existed sufficiently strongly in French studies to have produced a body of revisionist denials. The term ‘Neo-Classic’ has largely dropped out of the corridors of Englitbiz, usually to be replaced by ‘Augustan’, though one of the most loudly ballyhooed non-events in recent English studies has been an attempt to dislodge ‘Augustan’ too, on the grounds that some 18th-century authors took a dim view of Augustus Caesar ... ”