Form and Contentment

Forming History, Inhabiting Form in Marvell's “Upon Appleton House”

“…Kari Boyd McBride's (2001: 3, 9) study of country house poetry, the genre that concerns us here, similarly presumes that a literary form can exercise a predictable 27. Important examples of work committed to treating historical and literary elements as equally generative include Barkan et al 2009;Cohen 2007;Coiro and Fulton 2012b;Dubrow 1990 (in which Dubrow coined the term new formalism); Rasmussen 2002. For theoretical formulations treating history and literary form in active relationship, see especially Rooney 2000;Wolfson 2000; and the review of work to date in Levinson 2007. effect: "Country house discourse . .…”

Introduction: Epic's Historic Form

“…It repeatedly sounds trumpets of despair that literary study, in forgetting its formalist roots, has forgotten itself. 8,9 Tucker laments a 'knee-jerk contempt for formal inquiry' among many literary critics, a 'telescopic philanthropy' foreclosing other 'modalities of response'. The result is 'a serious dereliction: the enervation of literary close reading in critical practice'.…”

Form and Global Consciousness in the Victorian Period

“…Often, studies of global interconnection in the Victorian period raise questions about subjectivity and social structures by addressing form, analyzing style, narration, or plot. Following Ellen Rooney’s definition of formalism as “a matter not of barring thematizations but of refusing to reduce reading entirely to the elucidation, essentially the paraphrase, of themes” (29), I suggest that these recent works reflect varying levels and kinds of formalist tendencies. Indeed in literary studies at large there has been a renewed and self‐professed fascination with form.…”