Writing to rule

Claude Rawson

• Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism by Gordon Pocock
  Cambridge, 215 pp, £12.50, June 1980, ISBN 0 521 22772 0
• ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and its Illustrations 1714-1896 by Robert Halsband
  Oxford, 160 pp, £11.50, July 1980, ISBN 0 19 812098 2

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. This, as someone remarked, is a bit like dropping the word ‘candidate’ because such persons no longer wear a white toga.