The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies

Bibliographic Data

ID12880433
AuthorsSeth Lerer (0000-0002-8573-4219, Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume1
Issue1
Pages**-**
Publication date2004-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLiterature Compass (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00006.x
OpenAlexW2010266520
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited29

In spite of the historicism that has dominated medieval English literary study for the past two decades, formalist approaches will not go away. Not only is close reading still the default mode of pedagogy for many medievalists, but certain genres (especially the Middle English lyric) still attract formalist criticism. This article argues that historicist criticism has excluded such genres from the current mainstream of literary history, and that, to some extent, the canon of Middle English literature (and, in particular, of Chaucerian production) has been reshaped according to historicist critical and ideological goals. But there remains a place for the study of form, as formal patterns (in the words of the critic Franco Moretti), ‘are what literature uses in order to master historical reality’. Formalist analysis in medieval literary study needs to be reclaimed from its New Critical close reading, but it also needs to be seen as the place where aesthetics and ideology may come together

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Formalism (music · Historicism · Ideology · Literary criticism · Literature · Mainstream · New Historicism · Political science · Politics · Byzantine Studies and History · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

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