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'Twenty years ago, when asked where the field of Victorian poetry was headed, my answer focused on methodology and a term—“cultural neoformalism”—that seemed useful in situating my own doctoral work in relation to the field.I was just young enough to have witnessed the aftermath of disciplinary acrimony among historicists, formalists, and theorists (the so-called culture wars of the 1980s), and the yoking of cultural studies to formalist methods seemed like a way out of the woods and on to greener pastures.A Rutgers University conference organized by Meredith McGill in 2002 on “The Traffic in Poems” had showcased scholarship in a transatlantic frame and a range of methods that largely reflected this intersection of culture and form, and I was smitten.' (Introduction)
