The Case for a Feminist Return to Form

Our contribution to this forum is guided by two questions: What might a return to form mean for the study of early modern women's writing? And what might be the implications of a feminist formalist methodology for the field of early modern studies more broadly? Formalism as a method, of course, has a long and close connection to the study of early modern literature: British critic William Empson took early modern texts as his primary objects of study, and Cleanth Brooks, one of the most influential proponents of New Criticism, used poetry by Donne, among others, to illustrate his principles.¹ By the latter part of the twentieth century, however, this mid-century emphasis on close reading and, especially, on the structural and ideological unity of literary works gave way to historicism and cultural criticism. The New Historicism—again largely defined in and through the work of notable scholars of early modern literature such as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose—resisted both the New Critical concept of literary unity and the decontextualization of texts that such analysis tended to privilege.² Instead, new historicists and cultural materialists, a related critical mode that emerged out of Britain at the same time, reimagined literary works as one form of cultural production among many, as part of a complex historical milieu rather than a fixed or isolated site of aesthetic meaning. Form never disappeared entirely as a category of analysis, of course, and the New Historicist opposition to form has at times been overstated.³ Nevertheless, historicist and cultural criticism tended to separate questions about history or culture from questions about form, giving precedence to the former over the latter.⁴

The ascendancy of historicism in literary studies occurred simultaneously with the advent of serious and sustained scholarship on early modern women's writing, which took shape in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. It is therefore not surprising that much of this early feminist scholarship sought not only to recover the writings of early modern women, but also to understand the historical, cultural, religious, economic, and ideological conditions of women's lives through their literary output. Form was not typically a pressing concern of this early scholarship, and indeed formalist inquiry—at least in the sense of an older, New Critical style of aesthetic analysis—was frequently understood to be at odds with feminist criticism. The analysis of such features as rhyme, figures of speech, or structure was often seen as narrow, limiting, and not directly relevant to the gendered dimensions of the works under investigation.⁵ Some critics, including Barbara Lewalski in the landmark Writing Women in Jacobean England, specifically called for formalist readings of Renaissance women's writing. Lewalski aimed to use "techniques of formalist analysis" to draw attention to early women's writing "in aesthetic as well as political terms."⁶ But most early feminist scholars on early modern women's writing turned to historical, cultural, biographical, and other contextual methods rather than to formalism as their primary critical lens. Even in those studies that did consider formal elements, biographical or contextual material related to the author's status as a woman writer frequently set the terms of analysis.⁷ This critical interest in women's negotiation of their identities as women writers is a preoccupation that continues to shape the field today.

In recent years, however, early modern studies has witnessed a return to form, a trend that is also at work in the field of literary studies more broadly. The publication of Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements in 2002 heralded a renewed interest in formalism within Renaissance literary studies, with editor Mark David Rasmussen urging scholars to consider afresh how the meanings of literary texts "are shaped and enabled by the possibilities of form."⁸ These "new" or "historical" approaches to formalism reject any simple division between form and content, and instead view form as central to knowledge production. Caroline Levine uses the term "affordances" of form to describe this process, encouraging literary scholars to be attentive to the "potential uses or actions...