Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence.

May 3, 2025 · Also known as rhetorical criticism and New Criticism, formalism constitutes one of the many lenses through which critics view and interpret literature.

Later, largely through the work of the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, it became influential in the West, notably in Anglo-American New Criticism, which is sometimes called Formalism.

In literature, formalism is a school of literary theory. It’s more concerned with the structure of the text than any outside influence.

May 22, 2025 · Formalism is a critical theory that prioritizes structure, language, and form over context, authorial intent, or social relevance. By looking at literary works as self-contained units, formalism …

Taken to their extreme, formalist ideas even go so far as to exclude the author as an interpretive criterion; formalism is concerned solely with the text itself, and is disinterested in the text's …

Jan 15, 2026 · What is Formalism? "Formalism refers to the critical tendency that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century and devoted its attention to concentrating on literature's formal …

In literary criticism, Formalism refers to a style of inquiry that focuses, almost exclusively, on features of the literary text itself, to the exclusion of biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts.

A systematic formalism to define activities and business processes is presented, as well as clear mathematical formulation and template representations.

The meaning of FORMALISM is the practice or the doctrine of strict adherence to prescribed or external forms (as in religion or art); also : an instance of this.