Dissenting Formalism

Abstract: Studies of literary form often intentionally separate themselves from a study of religious history. This essay takes the work of Mary Wollstonecraft as an opportunity to explore the intersection of form and religious orientation. Her criticism, novels, and feminist writing accentuate a prominent habit of thought in the works of Romanticism, from Wordsworth's concern with the "affinities between religion and poetry" to Anna Barbauld's account of poetry as "enthusiastic zeal." In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman , Wollstonecraft considers Providential "design" to be perceptible only insofar as it engages the dissenting judgment of human subjects. This approach to design inflects her analysis of literary works as well; she can "comprehend" such works as coherent entities only when they solicit—rather than suppress—her authority as a reader. And she thus launches a series of attacks on Rousseau, Milton, and a host of other writers on account of their faulty or utterly absent "form." The essay concludes with reflections on how Wollstonecraft's argument might revise conventional accounts of literary form as well as literature's presumed relation to religious and secular communities.