Description
Book SynopsisWhy care about poetic form and its intricacies, other than in nostalgia for a bygone era of criticism? The purpose of this book is to refresh today this care for criticism, applying a historically aware formalist reading to poetic form in Romanticism and showing how in theory and practice Romantic writers addressed, debated, tested, and contested fundamental questions about what is at stake in the poetic forming of language. In the process, it suggests the importance of these conflicted inquiries for contemporary critical discussion and demonstrates the pleasures of attending to the complex changes of form in poetic writing.
After an introductory chapter on the controversies about poetic form and formalism from the Romantic era to our own, succeeding chapters consider particular instances in Romantic poetry in which experimental agendas or unsettled traditions promote an awareness of new textual possibilities. The author shows how Blake''s Poetical Sketches predicts man
Trade Review
"This book is the real thing: learned, patient, thoroughly researched, fresh, corrective, and expertly written. It confronts the chill that has descended on the major poetic texts of Romantic studies from the anti-formalist animus of certain latter-day practitioners with a cool authority all its own. This is counter-critique at its very best."—Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa
"A fine book that consciously flies in the face of prevailing critical currents through its detailed emphasis on poetic form in the big six Romantic poets. . . . This is a first-rate book—persuasive, well written, and with the interpretive radar on high."—European Romantic Review
"An important study by an important critic."—Studies in English Literature
"Wolfson's strengths are comprehensiveness and attention to process; her book includes and excellent introductory chapter on the history of formalism that reviews critical debates that have erupted over how poetry reforms traditional practice."—Choice
"The publication of Susan Wolfson's ...book Formal Charges is a terribly important event, not only in the history of Romantic Studies, but in the history of the theoretical discourses currently questioning whether the study of literature should become Cultural Studies, and asking to what extent the practice of aesthetic appreciation should be abandoned for political criticism."—Romanticism on the Net
Table of Contents
Abbreviations 1. Formal intelligence: formalism, romanticism, and formalist criticism 2. Sketching verbal form: Blake's Political Sketches 3. The formings of simile: Coleridge's 'comparing power' 4. Revision as form: Wordsworth's drowned man 5. Heroic form: couplets, 'self', and Byron's Corsair 6. Teasing form: the crisis of Keats's last lyrics 7. Social form: Shelley and the determination of reading Notes Index.
