Thursday, January 10, 2013
pseudoclassic \soo-doh-KLAS-ik\,
adjective:
1. Falsely or spuriously classic.
2. Imitating the classic: the pseudoclassic style of some modern authors.
He also points out that any comment on this pseudoclassic literature "should not fail to distinguish the truly Augustan circle of Butler and Johnson and Reynolds and Goldsmith and Burke, whose humanism, like that of Horace, contained, not so much explicitly as in solution, the higher insight which the philosophy of their age was busily hiding away."
-- Stephen L. Tanner, Paul Elmer More: "Literary Criticism As the History of Ideas"
She hurried along till she came to what, from the pseudoclassic appearance of the structure, seemed a place of dissenting worship.
-- Horace W.C. Newte, "Sparrows"
He was tired, he said, of the tirades and the beaux vers of the Classic and pseudo-Classic authors: "I ask for Shakespeare," he cried pathetically, "and they give me Ducis."
-- Arthur Fitzwilliam Davidson, "Victor Hugo: His Life and Work"
Pseudoclassic originated in the 1830s and was applied mainly to art, architecture and literature which mimicked the classic styles.
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