Critical Forms Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750-2020

Critical Forms is an account of the generic forms in which literary criticism has been undertaken. It examines chiefly Anglophone literary criticism, with comparative discussion of French and German material, from around 1750 to the present and examines prefaces, selections and anthologies, reviews, lectures, dialogues, letters, and life-writing. Though not intended to be an exhaustive history of the period, Critical Forms begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the emergence of something like the forms (chiefly, the essay and the treatise) in which criticism is still predominantly practised.

In order at least to complicate this predominance, the book documents an abiding plurality in the forms of literary critical writing in the subsequent period, leading up to the present. Ross Wilson both questions the status of the essay and treatise as the 'natural' forms of literary criticism and shows that the history of literary criticism is much more formally various and innovative than the usual ways of recounting that history as a succession of schools and movements would allow. Critical Forms harbours the hope that it will make available a wider array of forms for the practice of literary criticism today; it is this hope that licenses its own experiments in critical form.

Ross Wilson, Associate Professor of Criticism, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Emmanuel College

Ross Wilson is Associate Professor of Criticism in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is the author of Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (2013), books on Theodor Adorno and Immanuel Kant, and numerous essays in the history and theory of literary criticism, aesthetics, and Romantic and Victorian poetry. He is editor of The Meaning of 'Life' in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (2009) and Percy Shelley in Context, as well as co-editor of Romantic Circles Reviews and Receptions.