strict or excessive adherence to prescribed or external forms, structures, or techniques, e.g. in religion or art, often without regard to their content, inner significance, moral value, etc
Formalism privileges form (style, structure, genre) over thematic content or historical specificity in the analysis or evaluation of works of art and literature. In the 1920s the Russian Formalists believed that art should make strange the familiar by representing it in new ways — Professor Catherine Belsey
the structure of a logical, mathematical, or scientific argument as opposed to its content
formalist noun and adj
formalistic adj
formalistically /-ʹlistikli/ adv