Poetic Form

Registration is open for Renaissance Poetic Form: New Directions. This conference at Wolfson College, Oxford, 5-7 July 2012, will draw together leading international literary scholars to discuss the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in early modern English studies. We are currently in an exciting period of literary criticism, as scholars review the formal, political, theoretical and historical approaches of the previous century and call for perspectives which unite formal and historical study. This conference will provide a major forum for reviewing current work and establishing new lines of enquiry in this emergent field. With a programme of speakers from different areas of English studies, including literary history, historicism, manuscript study, and prosodic theory, the conference will address urgent questions about how we can understand and analyse literary form in a historically-rooted way, and will encourage fresh discussion about the status of formal and aesthetic considerations in editing and literary criticism, as well as in the development of new, electronic resources for studying early modern texts. Further details are at http://renaissancepoeticform.wordpress.com/ or do contact the organisers Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton at renaissancepoeticform@gmail.com