Formalism Criticism

Literary criticism, being the analysis, evaluation, description, or interpretation of literary works, has nine main subcategories. One of the earliest forms of the nine criticisms that came about was formalism criticism. Formalism rose to eminence in the early twentieth century as a response against Romanticism theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individuals creativity and instead retained the text itself back into the spotlight, to demonstrate how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had followed it. Two types of formalist literary criticism were established, Russian formalism, and later Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism criticism, also known as Russian formalism, focuses mainly on how the sentences, rather than the content, compose the literary works. Formalism completely disregards what the author is trying to portray as the essential message of the book to the reader and simply breaks down the sentences into literary devices for the whole novel. The formalist approach diminishes the significance of a text’s cultural or historical content. This style of criticism not only includes grammar and mechanics, but also literary devices such as repetition, oxymoron, alliteration, and many more. Formalism criticism takes a whole piece of literature and breaks it down as a whole into the different literary devices. I would like to thank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(literature) for assisting me on constructing such a wonderful definition of Formalism Criticism.