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The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture

Online ISBN:
9780191795282
Print ISBN:
9780198702818
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (ed.),
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
(ed.)

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, King's College, London
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Ben Burton (ed.)
Ben Burton
(ed.)

English Teacher

English Teacher, Nottingham High School
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Published online:
21 August 2014
Published in print:
26 June 2014
Online ISBN:
9780191795282
Print ISBN:
9780198702818
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The Work of Form: Poetics, Materiality and Culture in Early Modern England draws together leading international literary scholars to discuss the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in early modern English Studies. With contributors from literary history, historicism, manuscript study, prosodic theory, the history of music, history of the book, as well as print, manuscript, and material culture, the collection establishes new lines of enquiry in this emergent field by expanding definitions of form to consider the material as well as theoretical implications of the term, including form's associations with physical shape and sensory response; processes of gathering and restricting; the body, discipline and training; ritual; musical performance; as well as the material status of the text. The essays in this collection address what we might mean by the work of form in early modern literary studies. Form is both an object and a process, and its deployment raises questions of agency relating to writers and readers, including the creative work undertaken by poets to form their poems; the work that forms make readers do, including the action of form upon the ear, mind and heart; as well as the interpretive work that readers always bring to the forms they read. In doing so, this collection addresses urgent questions about how we can understand and analyse literary form in a historically-rooted way, and demands rigorous discussion about the status of formal and aesthetic considerations in editing and literary criticism, as well as in the development of material formalisms.

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