The novel and the sea

The triumph of life

His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in “New Formalism,” a close attention to textual language and structure that departs from the outdated and regressive stances of old formalisms (especially “New Criticism”) by interrogating the connections between form, history, and culture. This article surveys the contributions of New Formalism to Romanticism studies and applies its techniques to two canonical texts, suggesting that New Formalism is useful both for literary criticism and teaching literature. Opening with a survey of New Formalist theory and practices, and an overview of the theoretical innovations within New Formalism that have been made by Romantic scholars, the article applies New Formalist techniques to William Wordsworth’s Prelude and William Blake’s Milton: a Poem. Often read as poems seeking to escape the dispiriting failure of the French Revolution, these texts, I argue, engage the formal strategies of epic poetry to enter the discourse of the period, offering competing ways to conceive of the self in relation to history. Written during the Romantic epic revival, when more epics were composed than at any other time in history, these poems’ allusive dialogue with Paradise Lost and with the epic tradition more broadly allows them to think through the self’s relationship to the past, a question energized by the Revolution Controversy. I explore how Wordsworth uses allusion to link himself to Milton and ultimately Virgil, both privileging the past and thereby asserting the value of the present as a means of reiterating and restoring it; Blake, in contrast, alludes to Milton to query the very idea of dependence on the past. These readings are intertwined with my experiences of teaching, as I have employed New Formalism to encourage students to develop as writers in response to texts. An emphasis on form provides students with concrete modes of entry into discussing literature and allows instructors to help students identify and revise the forms and structures of their own writing in response to literature.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/2/100/pdf

New Formalism in the Classroom: Re-Forming Epic Poetry in Wordsworth and Blake

The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature by Zoe Beenstock (review)

This essay traces the history of the hot-air balloon as a figure for formalist approaches to reading poetry, and finds the most compelling and enigmatic investigation of the trope in Anna Letitia Barbauld's mock-epic poem of 1797, "Washing Day." Anticipating Nicholson Baker, Maureen McLane, and Helen Vendler's modern uses of the hot-air balloon as a symbol for formalist literary analysis, Barbauld concludes her poem with the figure of the Montgolfier balloon as a "bubble" that is equated with the production of verse, a simile rife with anxiety about the relationship of poetics to the domestic labor of washing, but also to the manifold discourses implied by the Romantic-era balloon, such as political invasion, femininity, cosmopolitanism, and even madness. What emerges at the end of Barbauld's poem, however, is not the dismissal of eighteenth-century women's work (whether laundry or poetry) but a transhistorical model of poetic form as a technology to be operated by a close reader, an idea that subverts Cleanth Brooks' metaphor of the "well wrought urn" through Margaret Cohen's account of "craft." Resisting Brooks' notion that the poetic vessel is antiquarian, inert, and stable, Barbauld's airborne vessel, like Cohen's ships, is dynamic, labor-intensive, and buffeted by external currents. The transhistorical reach of the trope of the balloon through literary criticism that this paper traces brings into focus the reader's relation to poetic form in a new way, to ask what treating formalism as technology might mean for the conception of close reading as labor.

Arden Hegele

Papers

The Politics of Romanticism: The Social Contract and Literature by Zoe Beenstock (review)

Romantic Balloons: Toward a Formalist Technology of Poetics