MARK DAVID RASMUSSEN is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Centre College, where he teaches medieval and renaissance literature. He has published essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and the poetics of complaint. AE(00): Afterword by RICHARD STRIER

• Introduction New Formalisms?; M.D.Rasmussen PART I: TOWARD A HISTORICAL FORMALISM Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism; S.Cohen Shakespeare and the Composite Text; D.Bruster The Politics of Aesthetics: Recuperating Formalism and the Country House Poem; H.Dubrow Marston's Gorge and the Question of Formalism; J.Loewenstein PART II: RENEWING THE LITERARY Learning from the New Criticism: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets; P.Alpers The Aesthetics of Shakespearean Wordplay; M.Womack The Poetics of Speeck Tags; W.Flesch Flirting with Eternity: Teaching from a Meter in a Renaissance Literature Class; E.H.Sagaser Afterword: How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can't Do Without It; R.Strier

These essays brilliantly display the pleasures offormalism and constitute a rigorous and thrilling demonstration of its indispensability. - Stanley Fish, Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago.