During the nineteenth century the study of literary history was Iargely dominated by the external approach: art and literature were analysed in terms of context and author (their referential function) to the detriment of artistic specificity (their poetic function). Poetics as the science of literature, a theory concerned with aesthetic forms, genres, artistic devices and the use of language was revived only during the early years of the twentieth century notably in the work of the Russian Formalists and later in the various writings of the Prague Linguistic Circle, American New Criticism and post-war French Structuralism. There is, here a parallel with art history: Wolfflin's "art without names' (developed around 1900) assumed that visual forms and their mode of perception enjoyed an independent history apart from the intentions of individual artists and their psychology. This theory of an anonymous, immanently autonomous evolution of forms ignored the problem of socio-historical specificity and the complex ways in which the external context determined changes in style and set limits to the choice of themes and content. It was the Bakhtin School, through their critique of Russian Formalism and contemporary linguistic theory, which proposed the abolition of the dualism, art and society, conceiving artistic forms as immanently social and historical.