Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies

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.