Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
1 - Content and Form
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase
- 1 Content and Form
- 2 Anthony Trollope on Akrasia, Self-Deception and Ethical Confusion
- 3 Justifying Anachronism
- 4 The Scourge of the Unwilling: George Eliot on the Sources of Normativity
- 5 Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound
- 6 Robert Browning, Augusta Webster and the Role of Morality
- Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading
- Index
Summary
What is the content of a literary text? The extent to which literary criticism has thought this question trivial and unimportant is conveyed well by the Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms, which offers a seven-paragraph definition for ‘form’ but contains no entry for ‘content’, going directly from ‘consonance’ to ‘context’ (it is perhaps worth noting that the dictionary does find space for ‘cybercriticism’, ‘eurocentrism’, and a six-paragraph definition of ‘rhizome’). Yet the dictionary also, if only accidentally, conveys a sense of the necessity of the concept. Aside from the use of the term ‘content’ in dozens of definitions of other terms, the dictionary's definition of ‘paraphrase’ ends with this line: ‘See also CONTENT, FORM, STYLE, TEXTURE’. So at some point it appears that the authors recognised the need for a definition of content, but in the face of the competing need to devote adequate attention to Deleuze and Guattari they ultimately decided it wasn't worth it.
To its credit, the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms at least includes the word, defining it thus:
CONTENT: The term commonly used to refer to what is said in a literary work, as opposed to how it is said (that is, to the form or style). Distinctions between form and content are necessarily abstractions made for the sake of analysis, since in any actual work there can be no content that has not in some way been formed, and no purely empty form. The indivisibility of form and content, though, is something of a critical truism which often obscures the degree to which a work's matter can survive changes in its manner (in revisions, translations, and paraphrase) and it is only by positing some other manner in which this matter can be presented that one is able in analysis to isolate the specific form of a given work.
What is striking about this attempt to define the word is the way it reverses itself. The definition starts with what has been one common way of defining content and explicating the content/form distinction: it's the what-is-said by the text, versus the how-it-is-said of form.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Ideas in Victorian LiteratureLiterary Content as Artistic Experience, pp. 39 - 75Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020