When Novels Were Books

Much of Jordan Stein's book When Novels Were Books takes place during the period we call baroque, and this is basically irrelevant to his argument except as the setup for a punchline to a joke that is itself maybe too baroque to be really funny. From the Anglophone perspective, the baroque—which, according to some critics, took place everywhere but England and its colonies—seems strangely mechanic. The baroque is a land of formulas. It is, to our aesthetic categories, ugly. More offensively, its subjects are products of artifice. They are not sincere and not organically in touch with their inner selves. By contrast, we Anglophone readers have inherited a better recognition of real character. It is our Protestant legacy. We know authentic character when we see it, including our own. Though we perhaps developed that capacity for recognition through the technology of literary genres, it was through stories of real experience...