Near the end of Distant Reading, a collection of his influential essays on literary methodology, Franco Moretti writes that ‘formal analysis is the great accomplishment of literary study’, and that any alternative to it must show that it is somehow superior or at least equal. The claim is presented as if it is more or less obvious; what is necessary in Moretti's mind is not to justify formalism, but instead to show that his variation on formalism can offer new insights. But that phrase – ‘the great accomplishment’ – should give one pause. Why, exactly, is formalism the most significant achievement of literary criticism, and what conception of literature lies behind this claim?

Caroline Levine's award-winning book Forms shares the same basic sense of the nature of literary criticism. ‘One of the great achievements of formalism’, she tells us, ‘has been the development of rich vocabularies and highly refined skills for differentiating among forms.’ Indeed reading for form is ‘what literary critics have traditionally done best’. Susan Wolfson, in the book that initiated the ‘New Formalism’, similarly holds up formalism as the element of literary criticism that is worth preserving. She is ‘struck by how tenacious the subject has proven’; quoting Geoffrey Hartman approvingly, she notes how hard – and by hard she means impossible – it is to move beyond formalism. Levine's version of formalism and her justification for it differs significantly from Moretti's – and Wolfson's differs from both – but all three writers share the same basic sense that the greatest thing literary studies has done is to think about form.