Reading for Form

Susan J. Wolfson is professor of English at Princeton University. Marshall Brown is professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington and editor of Modern Language Quarterly.

"An extraordinarily wide-ranging collection, spanning texts and issues from the Middle Ages to contemporary theory. Formalism, it becomes clear, is not something that literary studies have ever superseded but rather an abiding preoccupation that both literature and its critics have continually endorsed and assimilated in a surprising array of registers and concerns. The contributors are all leaders in their respective fields and their collective effort will be required reading for students of literature at all levels."--William Galperin, Rutgers University

• Introduction: Reading for Form / Susan J. WolfsonForm and Contentment / Ellen RooneyHating and Loving Aesthetic Formalism: Some Reasons / Virgil NemoianuMedieval Forma: The Logic of the Work / D. Vance SmithGuess Who's Coming to Dinner? Reinterpreting Formalism and the Country House Poem / Heather Dubrow"Among Unequals What Society": Paradise Lost and the Forms of Intimacy / Ronald LevaoFormalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet / J. Paul HunterThe Signature and the Initial in Zukofsky's "A" / Susan Stewart"Sound Scraps, Vision Scraps": Paul Celan's Poetic Practice / Marjorie PerloffEverybody Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty / Robert KaufmanJane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form / Frances FergusonThe Foreign Offices of British Fiction / Garrett StewartThe Slaughterhouse of Literature / Franco MorettiFormalism and Time / Catherine GallagherContributorsIndex