...and reviews, to say nothing of occasional pieces of journalism. distinguished dixhuitiemiste whose interests in drama and poetry ranged over the literature of the period in French, German, Italian, and Spanish as well as English, and who could write authoritatively--as he did in Word as Bond--on English literature from the medieval period onward, he also produced books and articles on Faulkner and on the literature and film of the American West, especially the Southwest borderlands. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature (University of Delaware, 2003) is his last book. Though in its length and its close focus on particulars it can seem in some ways a small book, it is well worth careful attention. Interesting and enlightening, engaging and instructive, it is in its concerns, its methods of proceeding, and its flavor, highly characteristic of the man himself. One may find greater monuments to the special qualities of Canfield's mind in the full range of his scholarship than this, but, to my mind, there is nothing in all his other work that so captures the man I knew. Doug and I were close friends, and, like so many of his other friends, even just his bare acquaintances, I loved being in his company. Reading this book is like having, still, a series of conversations with him--nor are these conversations at all so one-sided as one might expect.

The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature comprises fourteen chapters, each a more or less separate essay, plus an introduction and a "concluding meditation." Each chapter, typically, focuses on one or more specific features of a text or group of texts by one or two authors whom Canfield sees as making a pair. Arranged chronologically, these essays begin with Milton and end with Gay and Fielding. They include considerations of Cavendish and Philips, Waller and Etherege, Dorset and Sedley, Buckingham and Rochester, Behn, Dryden, Killigrew and Finch, Rowe and Pope and Gildon and their publishers, Pope (another two essays), Montagu, and Swift. Pope gets considerably more attention than any other author, but then, too, there is a strong bias in favor of poetry here. Drama, which so greatly interested Canfield elsewhere, is represented only by Etherege's Man of Mode, Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and Fielding's The Author's Farce. Rowe's and Pope's editions of Shakespeare get attention only insofar as Gildon and Curll parasitically attached themselves to the two Tonsons publication of them. Dryden, Behn, and Montagu, for their part, are considered only as poets. The essay on Swift is anomalous in this respect, as it takes up not his poetry, but Book Three of Gulliver's Travels.

Described thus, the book can seem somewhat of a miscellany, an impression that may be reinforced when it is observed that six of the fourteen essays are based on previously published materials. (This means, though, that the majority of the book is still new.) Canfield takes pains to overcome this impression with his introductory and concluding remarks on the "baroque" and its relation to the "neoclassical." In a superb foreword, J. Paul Hunter makes a similar effort. The "baroque," for Canfield, is anything that upsets the smooth-moving and decorous applecart of "neoclassical" literary practice. "Neoclassical" art, Canfield says, is commonly seen as that which "imitates the classics and stresses order, restraint, the rational, the lucid." It values "regularity and decorum." The "baroque," conversely, "stresses disorder, excrescence, exuberance, the irrational, the grotesque, the cryptic": "It surprises. It puzzles. It pops up where we least expect it. It disrupts, often causing rereading, reinterpretation"; it has "a dark and disruptive side." With the onset of the "long" eighteenth century, the neoclassical succeeds the baroque but never quite represses it. Well into the eighteenth century, but declining with "the ascendance of the Hanoverians," there are "baroque moments in or baroque aspects of works that really only pretend to be (neo)classical" (15-17).

Each of the essays that follow focuses on such "moments" or "aspects," emphasizing not only the "surprisingly delightful quality" of "the baroque disruption of the neoclassical" but also what it "means" (italics in original). Harking back to his graduate days at Yale and Hopkins, Canfield calls his method "reading out," by which he means using the techniques of "close reading" developed by the New Critics (and currently "discredited in the academy") in "richly referential" ways. Whatever our concerns may be with the large historical, cultural, social,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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