These is no one school of Formalism, and the term groups together a number of different approaches to literature, many of which seriously diverge from one another.
Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the United states and United Kingdom from the end of the second World War through the 1970s, and particularly the Formalism of the
“ New Critics ”, including I. A. Richards, john Crowe Ransom and T.S Eliot. On the European continent, Formalism emerged primarily and particularly out of the work of Roman Jacobson, Boris Eichenbaum,
And Viktor Shklovsky. Although the theories of Roman Jacobson and New Criticism are similar in a number of respects, the two schools largely developed in isolation from one another, and should not be considered identical. In reality, even many of the theories proposed by critics working within their respective schools often diverged from one another.