'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)