Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie, 1580–1830

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Will Bowers, Hannah Leah Crummé

   Pages 1-13

3. Literary Coteries of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke

   • Mary Ellen Lamb

   Pages 15-34

4. Maecenas and ‘Oxford-Witts’: Pedagogy and Flattery in Seventeenth-Century Oxford

   • Christopher Burlinson

   Pages 35-51

5. The Circulation of Verse at the Inns of Court and in London in Early Stuart England

   • Arthur F. Marotti

   Pages 53-73

6. ‘If I Had Known Him, I Would Have Loved Him’: Bloomsbury Appropriations of the Scriblerian Coterie

   • Abigail Williams, Peter Huhne

   Pages 75-92

7. The Hillarian Circle: Scorpions, Sexual Politics and Heterosocial Coteries

   • Christine Gerrard

   Pages 93-109

8. Edmund Spenser and Coterie Culture, 1774–1790

   • Hazel Wilkinson

   Pages 111-135

9. Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Forging of the Romantic Literary Coterie

   • Felicity James

   Pages 137-157

10. The Many Rooms of Holland House

    • Will Bowers

    Pages 159-180

11. Aggressive Intimacy: Mass Markets and the Blackwood’s Magazine Coterie

    • Robert Morrison

    Pages 181-200

12. Back Matter

    Pages 201-241

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This book is about the literary and friendship networks that were active in Britain for a 250 year period. Patterns in the nature of literary social circles emerge: they may centre upon a location, like Christ Church, or a person, like Aaron Hill; they may suffer stress when private relationships become public knowledge, as Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon shows; and they may model themselves on a preceding age, as the relationship between the Sidney circle and Lady Mary Wroth exemplifies. Despite these similarities, no two coteries are the same. The circles this volume examines even differ in their acceptance of their own status as a coterie: someone like Constance Fowler was certainly part of a strict familial coterie; the Scriberlians were a more informal set who were also members of other groups; and although Byron’s years of fame are regularly associated with Holland House, he often denied being of their party.

With an Afterword by Helen Hackett

• Social network
• Exchange
• Community
• Circle
• Friendship
• British and Irish Literature

   

• Merton College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

  Will Bowers

• Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, United Kingdom

  Hannah Leah Crummé

Will Bowers is Junior Research Fellow in English at the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include Romantic poetry; the idea of a cosmopolitan London; the trial of Queen Caroline; and English perceptions of Italy and Italians. He has published on these topics in international journals and is an assistant editor on the 'Longman Annotated English Poets' edition of The Poems of Shelley.


Hannah Leah Crummé is Head of Special Collections at Watzek Library, Lewis and Clark College, USA. Her research focuses on the political impact of the Sidney-Herbert-Dudley network. She has published broadly across her field and curated the exhibition ‘By me William Shakespeare’, which recently opened in Somerset House, London, UK.

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