Russian Formalism: Metapoetics (1984) by Petr Steiner differs from the previous authoritative book on the subject, Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine (1955) by Victor Erlich, not only in its subtitle but also in the detail of its perspective. While for Erlich, Czech structuralism was a Central European variant of formalism, for Steiner, they are two fundamentally different phenomena: structuralism represents a new paradigm of literary science, and formalism is an interparadigmatic period that paved the way for it. Steiner captured the diversity of this movement in three metaphors and one synecdoche, showing formalists the direction in their quest for a new, scientifically based poetics. The division of formalism into the metaphor of the machine (Shklovsky), organism (Zhirmunsky, Propp), system (Tynjanov), and the synecdoche of language (Jakobinsky, Tomachevsky, Jakobson) is also adhered to by the English-language version of Wikipedia.
