New Formalist Criticism defines and theorizes a mode of formalist criticism that is theoretically compatible with current thinking about literature and theory. New formalism anticipates a move in literary studies back towards the text and, in so doing, establishes itself as one of the most exciting areas of contemporary critical theory.

In recent years, the New Formalist movement has been growing and changing quickly, as poets from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives have found in formal poetics a tool of great potential range and power. The common perception of New Formalism's methods and goals, however, has altered much more slowly. "After New Formalism" is part of an expanding conversation on the formal possibilities of contemporary poetry and on the implications of formalism for poetic history, practice, and theory. Contributors include Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, David Mason, Marilyn Nelson, Molly Peacock, and Adrienne Rich, among others. From the Introduction "Over the years the mission and focus of this book changed to include thoughtful essays by poets engaging with formalism from outside its confines, as well as by younger poets who came to formalism with a more theoretical bent than their elders. While some of the essays here come much closer than others to my own vision of a "multiformalism" that truly encompasses the many formal poetic traditions, including experimental traditions, now native to the United States, this collection of thoughts on form by poets contains fresh insights about the implications of formalism for poetic history, practice, and theory." Annie Finch is the author of "The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse" (Michigan), and the editor of "A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women "(Story Line, 1994). She teaches creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

"Some of the most important literary theory of this century."--College English Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever written for both literature and its theory. Included here are four essays representing key points in the formalists' short history. Victor Scklovsky's pathbreaking "Art as Technique" (1917) vindicates disorder in literary style. His 1921 essay on Tristram Shandy makes that eccentric novel the centerpiece for a theory of narrative. A section from Tomashevsky's "Thematics" (1925) inventories the elements of stories. In "The Theory of the 'Formal Method'" (1927) Boris Eichenbaum defends Russian formalism from many attacks. An able champion, he describes formalism's evolution, notes its major workers and works, clears away decayed axioms, and rescues literature from "primitive historicism" and other dangers. These essays set a course for literary studies that led to Prague structuralism, French semiotics, and postmodern poetics. Russian Formalist Criticism has been honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.

This work is the first history and evaluation of contemporary American critical theory within its European philosophical contexts. In the first part, Frank Lentricchia analyzes the impact on our critical thought of Frye, Stevens, Kermode, Sartre, Poulet, Heidegger, Sussure, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, among other, less central figures. In a second part, Lentricchia turns to four exemplary theorists on the American scene—Murray Krieger, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom—and an analysis of their careers within the lineage established in part one. Lentricchia's critical intention is in evidence in his sustained attack on the more or less hidden formalist premises inherited from the New Critical fathers. Even in the name of historical consciousness, he contends, contemporary theorists have often cut literature off from social and temporal processes. By so doing he believes that they have deprived literature of its relevant values and turned the teaching of both literature and theory into a rarefied activity. All along the way, with the help of such diverse thinkers as Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Bloom, Lentricchia indicates a strategy by which future critical theorists may resist the mandarin attitudes of their fathers.

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

Speculative Formalism engages decisively in recent debates in the literary humanities around form and formalism, making the case for a new, nonmimetic and antihistoricist theory of literary reference. Where formalism has often been accused of sealing texts within themselves, Eyers demonstrates instead how a renewed, speculative formalism can illuminate the particular ways in which literature actively opens onto history, politics, and nature, in a connective movement that puts formal impasses to creative use. Through a combination of philosophical reflection and close rhetorical readings, Eyers explores the possibilities and limits of deconstructive approaches to the literary, the impact of the “digital humanities” on theory, and the prospects for a formalist approach to “world literature.” The book includes sustained close readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, as well as Alain Badiou, Paul de Man, and Fredric Jameson.

A radically new way of thinking about form and context in literature, politics, and beyond Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of "affordances" from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts. This book reprints Modern Language Quarterly's highly acclaimed special issue Reading for Form, along with new essays by Marjorie Perloff, D. Vance Smith, and Susan Stewart, and a revised introduction by Susan Wolfson. With historical case studies and insightful explorations, Reading for Form offers invaluable material for literary critics in all specializations.

In recent decades, literary critics have praised novel theory for abandoning its formalist roots and defining the novel as a vehicle of social discourse. The old school of novel theory has long been associated with Henry James; the new school allies itself with the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In this book, the author argues that actually it was the compatibility of Bakhtin with James that prompted Anglo-American theorists to embrace Bakhtin with such enthusiasm. Far from rejecting James, in other words, recent novel theorists have only refined James’s foundational recharacterization of the novel as the genre that does not simply represent identity through its content but actually instantiates it through its form. Social Formalismdemonstrates the persistence of James’s theoretical assumptions from his writings and those of his disciple Percy Lubbock through the critique of Jamesian theory by Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, and Gérard Genette to the current Anglo-American assimilation of Bakhtin. It also traces the expansion of James’s influence, as mediated by Bakhtin, into cultural and literary theory. Jamesian social formalism is shown to help determine the widely influential theories of minority identity expounded by such important cultural critics as Barbara Johnson and Henry Louis Gates. Social Formalismthus explains why a tradition that began by defining novelistic value as the formal instantiation of identity ends by defining minority political empowerment as aestheticized self-representation.