The Grounds of English Literature

Description: Cannon combines Marxist and Hegelian ideas of "form" to argue that "form is that which thought and things have in common" (5), enabling a valuation of form as a record of thinking in and about a culture. Formalist criticism (in this sense) of Middle English literature reveals a poverty of categories in literary history and encourages an expansion of our ideas of literary potential and of the idea of form itself.; Cannon challenges the traditional division of Old and Middle English literatures and explores the "body of learning that informed" particular texts (Layamon's Brut, the Ormulum, The Owl and the Nightingale, Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine-group, and several romances). He discusses romance in light of the "closing down of formal possibilities," considering Chaucer's uses of this "holographic" form or genre in BD and Th and his awareness that literature projects particularities into forms.