"Lords of Wine and Oil": Community and Conviviality in the work of Robert Herrick and his contemporaries

This conference comes halfway through the process of editing The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford UP, 2010) and will be held on the 18th-20th of July 2008 at Buckfast Abbey, near Herrick's vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devon. The conference will focus on the part played by Community, Conviviality and Friendship not only in Herrick's work, but in all forms of literary discourse in the early Stuart period (c.1600-c.1650). Discussions of writers who, due to rank, gender or conviction, cannot enter or are critical of certain communities or communal identities are also welcome.
Topics will include (but are not limited to):
· studies of individual clubs, coteries or salons and their literary output
· studies of individual writers working within such groups
· the formation, entrance criteria and exclusionary practices of these groups
· the treatment and significance of friendship
· composition and circulation of manuscript verse miscellanies
· the involvement of coteries and salons with wider political and social events
· the exploration or discussion by writers of communal identities
· competition and/or collaboration between writers
· relationships between writers, their patrons and/or their publics
· community, sociability and genre, including the country house poem and non-literary genres such as letters and sermons
· conflicts within and between communities
· the socio-cultural implications of print publication for literary communities
· verse exchanges, dedicatory poems and prefaces in print and manuscript
· relationship between orality, manuscript and print

Please send title and abstract of no more than 300 words by January 18th 2008 to Dr Ruth Connolly, School of English, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU or email: ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk