Re-reading for forms in sir Philip Sidney's defence of poesy

Corey McEleney

Jacqueline Wernimont

pp. 116-139

in: Verena Theile, Linda Tredennick (eds), New formalisms and literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Early modern literature, the field through which New Historicism first came into prominence and dominance, presents a special case for New Formalism. Early modern texts have been uncannily hospitable to New Historicist approaches (which may be an effect of their privileged position within earlier New Critical approaches) and are thus a site for formalist re-readings. More importantly, perhaps, early modern texts are hospitable to formal questions because early modern literary criticism and theory was essentially formalist. Working in an era of literary production that systematized its conceptions of genre and rhetoric, early modern authors obsessed over the forms by which texts produce their effects.