This chapter looks at the ways in which Galen posits the theoretical unity among the discrete physiological system, especially with a reference to tripartition. Unlike Platonic, the tripartition that is motivated by psychological conflict, Galen’s tripartition of physiological domains shows the three domains to be highly cooperative and co-dependent on each other. The respective material fluxes they control are together necessary for continued functioning. The chapter looks at Galen’s adoption of the popular philosophical idea that identity persists because of the form, and at his analysis of different causes, strongly influenced by the ideas of his contemporary Middle Platonists. While more popular analyses of causes explain that the body is unified in its design, it is the notion of cohesive cause, the chapter argues, that accounts for unified physiological functioning.

Galen employs several different taxonomies of body parts, dividing the body up in various ways. This chapter looks at some of the more prominent ones, especially those that either define parthood or shed light on Galen’s theorization of parthood in other ways. The central question guiding this discussion arises from claims about (in)expendability of various parts: why is it the case that, according to him, the loss of a bone leads to a complete loss of activity the bone supports (voluntary motion in a limb), but the loss of the stomach does not lead to the loss of the activity of nutrition. One of the key preoccupations emerging from various ways in which Galen differentiates bodily parts is the proper activity of parts, which shape his understanding of the role of parts and their significance relative to each other. The final sections of the chapter sketch out the difference between normative and functional understandings of a parthood.

Ezra Pound called Ulysses ‘a triumph in form’. In contrast, Holbrook Jackson deplored it as ‘chaos’, referring to ‘the arrangement of the book’ as ‘the greatest affront of all’. T. S. Eliot justified the ‘formlessness’ of Ulysses as a reflection of Joyce’s dissatisfaction with the novel form. Taking such comments as a springboard, this chapter attends to Ulysses’s capacity to produce pronounced effects of both form and formlessness, arguing that its longstanding position at the apex of the modernist canon is connected to this artful duality. Through its extensive intertextuality and practice of a gamut of generic forms, Joyce’s shape-shifting book invites its own critical insertion into ‘the tradition’. Simultaneously, it resists full absorption into any singular critical scheme through its flouting of expectations of stylistic unity and narrative closure. Ulysses achieves that exquisite balancing of pattern and disorder, or novelty and familiarity, that maximizes a work’s chance of being rated as ‘high art’. Yet its recognition as such was also considerably aided by the interpretations formulated by Joyce and his champions in the early days of the book’s reception.

Drill YouTube music videos are contradictory – nihilistic and collective, empty and humanizing, negatively assessing marginalization and societal nihilism, performing those scripts as a placebo for pain and humiliation, and also shaping popular culture in that image. This chapter explores drill YouTube music videos as cultural form, for what they tell us about the historical transformation of black diasporic sound culture, contemporary popular culture and its alternative cultural politics. Through an analysis of drill music videos, it identifies a shift away from sound culture towards video-music, and therein a shift to the networked and platformed moving image, and to narrative. This requires a reevaluation of the role of sound in alternative cultural politics and in black diasporic popular culture, and asks that drill video-music be evaluated on its contingent cultural terms, not on the terms of other cultural and musical moments.

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

Realism and modernism are often taken to be opposed literary movements, typically defined by an emphasis on content and form, respectively. When we look closely at the practices of the modernists, however, we see that they remain invested in many of the same concerns as realists – sociality, community, sentiment – even if these appear in new forms. Beginning with Henry James’s lifelong, and contradictory, engagement with George Eliot, this chapter then compares James Joyce’s Ulysses to Middlemarch, demonstrating their shared commitment to the ability of the aesthetic to both reveal and shape our common social world.

The development of the novel in premodern (pre–twentieth-century) China paralleled, to a significant extent, that of the novel in the West in that both were shaped by a changing social and cultural environment characterized by rapid commercialization and urbanization and a booming print culture, even if the former’s rise began almost two centuries earlier. Whereas the Western realistic novel flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Chinese novel had already experienced its golden age by the late eighteenth century. What sets the “realism” in the Chinese novel apart is its hybrid nature: A realistic narrative is often framed or punctured by the mythical/supernatural that tends to question the very veracity of this reality. Despite their shared fascination with realism, many fictional works, during both the premodern and modern periods, or both before and after the inpouring of the Western influence, have exhibited a deep concern over realism’s potential for moral “messiness” and, consequently, an urge to contain realism with various attempts at ideological intervention, whether Buddhist, Confucian, or communist.

This chapter charts a chronology of British literary realism in relation to nineteenth-century capitalism. It considers formal innovations in Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, situating those techniques in conjunction with processes such as enclosure, financialization, urbanization, and imperialism. Throughout, it argues for the dialectical faculties of novel forms (counterbalancing interior and exterior, individual and society, event and context, exceptional and exemplary, concrete and abstract, cartography and utopia) to mediate capitalist contradiction, transformation, and totality.

Chapter 2 explores the influence of the exilic Ovid in medieval scholastic contexts by examining three types of medieval forms. Firstly, accessus (introductions to authors) shaped how Ovid’s poetry would be interpreted: their heavy reliance on Ovid’s exilic self-fashioning and biographising meant that Ovidian exile came to frame Ovid’s entire corpus. Secondly, manuscripts of Ovid’s exile poetry and their paratexts, especially glosses and marginal annotations, provided a framework for teaching and learning through Ovid’s exile. Finally, florilegia and excerpted forms of Ovid’s exile poetry posed a challenge to that life–work connection formed by the exile poetry, ostensibly withdrawing the context of Ovid’s full output; but they nevertheless retained enough order for Ovid’s exile to be recognisable. Examining these forms illustrates two key aspects of medieval responses to Ovid’s exile. Accessus, glosses and florilegia are all deeply connected to pedagogy and to a medieval ‘scholastic sphere’ – monastic and secular places of learning in which Ovidian exile could be used to teach and preach. Further, the proliferation, diversity and sheer quantity of these different types of exilic Ovidiana are evidence for the popularity and widespread knowledge of Ovid and his exile in the later Middle Ages.

There exists, under various names and guises since the late nineteenth century,  a common subject position constructed among Western gay men that engages power, agency, embodiment, sexual experience and marginalized identity in a way that sheds light on the essence of Wagner’s musical idiom and its lasting force in Western culture. Through analysis and close reading of instrumental passages from the end of the opening prelude to Lohengrin and the prelude to Act II of Die Walküre, this article constructs a non-essentialist gay-male subjectivity to explain the emotional force that Wagner’s use of tonality, harmony, theme, form and timbre achieve from this particular viewpoint. More specifically, the article traces the various teleologies of Wagner’s compositional practice and the ways in which these musical teleologies reinforce the explicit textual and dramatic centralities of sex and power in Wagner’s work, themselves dependent on these same centralities in contemporary culture.

The term lyric conjures many different things: musical language, emotional intensity, the qualities of ritual or prayer, introspection, and interiority. It has also come to designate a wide variety of spoken, sung, and printed poetic forms. This chapter explores Shelley’s relations to these ideas and forms through his reading and his writing. It also places Shelley’s writing in the context of modern and contemporary lyric theory, which investigates and expands the meaning of the term lyric and puts useful pressure on assumptions we might have about poetic voice, subjects, or speakers. In bringing these various contexts together, I suggest that none of them can wholly determine Shelleyan lyric, which is by turns formally constrained and politically engaged, intimate and impersonal.

Building on work by Karol Berger, this chapter analyses the lengthy final scene of Act 1 from Wagner’s Die Walküre (starting at Sieglinde’s re-entry right before ‘Schläfst du, Gast?‘) through the lens of the formal pattern common in Italian operas of the first half of the nineteenth century and known as la solita forma. The model not only serves to identify the various formal types Wagner uses over the course of this scene but also reveals an intense interaction between form and drama: the formal cues of the different stages of la solita forma, each with its specific dramaturgical implications, are shaped by the shifting dynamics in the game of seduction and recognition between the enamoured siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde.

This chapter attends to the regular presence of grass in poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Walt Whitman and English war poetry to recent work by Oswald and Burnett, the poetry of grass works to articulate, obscure, and heal the marks of contemporary trauma. Grass also shapes the soundscapes and visual form of poetry to the extent that, as this chapter suggests, grass can be said to constitute the contemporary practice of composition itself. Like poetry, the green field works in and through trauma to find again new life after war and conquest, after personal loss. In its seemingly perpetual growing, grass finds in the poet new ways of making and responding.

As stylistics developed, it became increasingly clear that a purely formalist approach to identifying elements of style would not be adequate for explicating the functions of particular textual choices. Consequently, stylisticians began to integrate insights from linguistics concerning the relationship between form and function, paying ever greater attention to the role of context in the interpretative process. This chapter traces the development of stylistics from its origins as an application of linguistics to (mainly literary) texts, informed by concepts from Russian formalism, to a fully formed subdiscipline of linguistics as it began to draw on these functional approaches to language description and developed more of its own theories and analytical frameworks.

This chapter provides an overview of twentieth- and twenty-first-century explorations of poetic form, with a focus on late Imperial and early Soviet Modernism. Rebelling against nineteenth-century norms, Modernist poets sought to devise a poetic idiom more in tune with their era of rapid cultural, political, and technological change. The rich and diverse poetic output of this period did not simply reject the limits imposed by formal convention. Rather, it expanded them, experimenting with metrical forms as well as the visual and sonic shape of the poem to uncover the particular qualities of poetic language. The chapter also considers the effect of shifting social circumstances on poetry, and particularly the new forms it took as it addressed mass audiences. The final part of the chapter traces the resonance of Modernist experiments in later Soviet poetry and the continued importance attached to form in the work of contemporary poets.

J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

This chapter takes the history of literary history beyond the confines of the classical period, and past the formal parameters of prose. Its focus is Philostratus’ depiction of the Second Sophistic, one of most instrumental and contentious ancient models of epoch-making. The Second Sophistic is conventionally considered a world of prose. I make the case for the central role of poetry in Philostratus’ conception of its literary identity. After some preliminary remarks on the complex construct of the Second Sophistic as a cultural phenomenon, and the undoubtable but controversial role of Philostratus at the centre of it, I offer a close reading of the multiple moments of poetry within the Vitae Sophistarum, which shed new light on Philostratus’ approach to the textuality and temporality of this milieu. The chapter ends by discussing the Heroicus, which contains Philostratus’ most elaborate verse compositions, and sees the voices of ancient poets resurrected into new sophistic poetry. This close encounter with Philostratean verse reveals an active and experimental approach to the poetic tradition which treats canonical verse texts as both bounded and closed, and inherently unfinished, and where the lines between old and new, verse and prose, exegesis and literature are interrogated and undermined.