On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word

by Angela Leighton

Overview

What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199551934
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Angela Leighton is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She is the author of a number of books, including Shelley and the Sublime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart, as well as many essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature.

Table of Contents

1. Form's Matter: A Retrospective2. Art for Art: On Pots, Crocks, Lyres, and Flutes3. Touching Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism4. Aesthetic Conditions: Pater's Re-Forming Style5. Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee's Ghostly Aesthetics6. Just a Word: On Woolf7. Yeats's Feet8. Wallace Stevens' Eccentric Souvenirs9. W. S. Graham: In the Mind's Ear10. Forms of Elegy: Stevenson, Muldoon, Hill, Fisher11. Elegies of Form: Bishop, Plath, Stevenson12. Nothing, but: An Afterword