Formalist criticism

Abstract

By ‘formalist criticism’ I mean a broad critical approach which seeks to understand a work of fiction by attending to the way the author’s imaginative vision inheres in the novel in a significant form. However, the precise meaning of the term ‘form’ depends upon the particular critic’s focus of interest. The influential formalist school of New Criticism, for instance, isolates the text for examination, separating it both from its author’s intentions and from the reader’s response. The text is abstracted from its social and historical contexts, and is regarded as a distinct artefact, which possesses its own inner coherence and complex organic unity. And clearly the genre most appropriate as the subject of this methodology is poetry.