On Form assesses both the legacy of Victorian aestheticism and the nature of the literary. It tracks the development of the word 'form' since the Romantics and offers readings of, among others, Tennyson, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath. Original readings of poetry are combined with a powerful argument about the nature of aesthetic pleasure.

Angela Leighton is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She was previously Professor of English at the University of Hull. She has worked mainly on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, on women's writing, on aestheticism and the aesthetic, and on poetry generally. She has published many articles and various critical books, as well as three volumes of poetry.

• 1: Form's Matter: A Retrospective


• 2: Art for Art: On Pots, Crocks, Lyres, and Flutes


• 3: Touching Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism


• 4: Aesthetic Conditions: Pater's Re-Forming Style


• 5: Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee's Ghostly Aesthetics


• 6: Just a Word: On Woolf


• 7: Yeats's Feet


• 8: Wallace Stevens' Eccentric Souvenirs


• 9: W. S. Graham: In the Mind's Ear


• 10: Forms of Elegy: Stevenson, Muldoon, Hill, Fisher


• 11: Elegies of Form: Bishop, Plath, Stevenson


• 12: Nothing, but: An Afterword