The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature by J. Douglas Canfield (review)

156 nal subject, Swift offers reassurance: there were eighteenth-century texts which, like Mr. Markley’s rigorously revisionist study, were attuned already to Europe’s Lilliputian dreams of preeminence . Tara Ghoshal Wallace George Washington University J. DOUGLAS CANFIELD. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature. Newark and London: Delaware, 2003. Pp. 252. $47.50. After a prefatory puff by J. Paul Hunter , Mr. Canfield sketches an historical thesis—that from 1660 to 1760, baroque elements ruffle the supposed serenity of neoclassical works—then illustrates the thesis with close readings of texts from Milton to Gay and Fielding . The resulting book is in every sense slender: 166 pages of text, followed by notes and an anthology of ‘‘Poems Less Readily Available.’’ Since Mr. Canfield discusses more than twenty-five works, no reading is more than a few pages (none would make a journal article; most are really notes). And since his historical thesis is itself so general, nothing holds the sequence of readings together except the broad claim of moments of baroque exuberance. The thesis itself raises suspicion. Reason versus imagination, order versus energy , form versus defect of form, classic versus romantic—we all at some time imbibed these dichotomies: we used them, even as we came to understand their shortcomings, and most of us have spent the rest of our lives seeking to free ourselves of them. What helped at first to buttress generalizations about a period or to explain historical change turned out overly simple. In Mr. Canfield’s dichotomy, the neoclassical involves rationality, clarity, order, proportion, restraint, and decorum; the baroque, extravagance, exuberance, grotesquerie, obliquity, difficulty, mischievousness, the surprising—even paradox, irony, and all combinations of disparate elements from metaphysical wit to the mixture of high and low that populates mock-forms. His quest is thus for ‘‘baroque moments in or baroque aspects of works that really only pretend to be (neo)classical.’’ Pope’s Essay on Man promises a rational theodicy, but delivers something more like fideism: a baroque undercutting of form. His satires claim a healing moral purpose but often deliver vituperation and spite: baroque ‘‘différance.’’ Gulliver attacked by the libidinous female Yahoo is a ‘‘baroque moment’’ that pulls the rug from under his supposed superior humanity. The undercutting of epic diction when Dryden intrudes the name of Flecknoe in line 3 of Mac Flecknoe is a ‘‘crushing baroque diminuendo.’’ Given this expansive reading of the ‘‘baroque,’’ it is of course no surprise that eighteenth-century literature (like that of every other period) teems with it. Did anyone ever really preach a doctrine of its absence—did neoclassicism as Mr. Canfield defines it ever really exist? Do his terms help us to understand eighteenth -century literature in ways not equally pertinent to the sixteenth century , or the twentieth? Is a theoretical stance that stipulates irony to be unclassical of use for historical understanding ? One looks for some attention to such questions, but the brief ‘‘Concluding Meditation’’ that follows Mr. Canfield’s readings only reminds us that much in the eighteenth-century offers baroque pleasures, and so should not be written off as dully neoclassical. ...