Russian formalism

Russian Formalism Russian Formalism is a movement of literary criticism and interpretation that emerged in Russia during the second decade of the twentieth century and remained active until about 1930. It concentrated on analyzing the internal structure of literary texts and involved detailed inquiry into plot structure, narrative perspective, symbolic imagery, and other literary techniques. In other words, it stressed the importance of form and technique over content. This movement began in 1915-1916 with the founding …

…d other mid-century thinkers and scholars initiated French structuralism by applying linguistically inspired formal methods to literature and related fields. Structuralism attempted to investigate the "structure" of a culture as a whole by interpreting its interactive systems of signs. These systems included literary texts and genres as well as other branches of culture. Later, largely through the work of Roman Jakobson, it became influential in the West, notably in Anglo-American New Criticism, which is sometim