Form captivates us. Its varieties can be tied to different formalist explanations without undermining the coherence of literary study or the knowledge we produce (Kramnick and Nersessian 2017: 663–65). Formalisms plural lead to claims about what literary form is and what it does, from Sandra Macpherson's (2015: 401) “determinist formalism” that sees form as inescapably material to Caroline Levine's (2015) contention that a formalist politics can enact social change. Seemingly in the background now is the concern, once frequently expressed, that new formalism is primarily normative, a resurrection of Kantian aesthetics under which the only freedom form enables is the freedom of disinterested aesthetic judgment (Levinson 2007).
In Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, and Beauty in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, Abigail Zitin reminds us precisely of this: that the new-formalist focus on knowledge sidesteps the aesthetic and its pleasures. Zitin's book is a striking, rigorous,...
