This essay draws on formalist cultural studies and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which I call formalist materialism, an approach that reads ecological forms alongside aesthetic forms. Such an approach may have distinct advantages. Formalist materialism illuminates a new direction for formalists by connecting forms to embodiment, ecology, and material substances. It also offers a novel path for feminist materialists by suggesting historical objects and situations where human and nonhuman agencies might be clearer. As I demonstrate in readings of Karel Čapek and Virginia Woolf, this model of reading also might help reinvigorate ways of approaching early-twentieth-century modernism in our time of ecological crisis, but without looking for signs of our concerns and epistemologies in the past. [Abstract amended from original.]