Victorian
Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
By , University of Wisconsin-Madison (May 2007)
Section: Victorian
Subjects: Literature, Literary Theory, Victorian Literature.
Key Topics: historicism, novel and novella, formalism, literary criticism .
Abstract
This essay tells a story about the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between Victorian studies and literary formalism. After the New Critics had thrown Victorian literature into disrepute for its formalist failures, socio-political approaches to literature reclaimed the Victorians – but often by discarding form. This essay shows how recent criticism has begun to bring formalist approaches to historical and political concerns in exciting new ways, and it traces four dynamic trends in Victorian formalist criticism: form as ideology, form as a manifestation of socio-political relations, form as a self-conscious, deliberate mode of political engagement, and social institutions as forms.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00460.x
This article abstract has been viewed 3203 times.
Top 5 related articles
-
Teaching & Learning Guide for: Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies
By , University of Wisconsin, Madison
(Literature Compass 2008, August 2008)
Literature Compass -
The Novel (in Theory)
By , Rutgers University
(Vol. 5, November 2008)
Literature Compass -
Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies? – Historicism, Collaboration and Digital Editing
By , University of Hull
(Vol. 4, June 2007)
Literature Compass -
Literature and Medicine: Twenty-Five Years Later
By , Temple University
(Vol. 5, July 2008)
Literature Compass -
The Distant Future? Reading Franco Moretti
By , Columbia University
(Vol. 7, March 2010)
Literature Compass
Top 5 Related Blackwell Reference Chapters
Criticism: Literary History and Literary Historicism
It may, however, be observed, that in civil history, there is to be found a much greater uniformity than ...
By Mark Salber Phillips
From A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century
Introduction
The essays in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism explore rhetoric as a practical art of ...
By Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted
“His tail at commandment”: George Puttenham and the Carnivalization of Rhetoric
The third book of George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie is devoted primarily to the part of rhetoric ...
By Wayne A. Rebhorn
Literary Studies
The systematic study and analysis of literature dates back to the beginnings of literary “text production”; ...
By Thomas Rommel
The Rhetorical Legacy of Kenneth Burke
What are they worrying about? Didn't we explain that we have no warlike intentions?Kenneth BurkeOver ...
By Herbert W. Simons