In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them. Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer's associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve's emphatic insistence that he was "aqweyntid" with Chaucer even after Chaucer's death, to John Lydgate's formations of "virtual coteries" of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections. By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.
R. D. Perry is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.
"Perry marshals a half-dozen authors and works from the late 14th-16th centuries to combine two focuses in medieval and Renaissance literary criticism-periods usually separated...With admirable sweep and clarity, Perry shows how these issues morph together during these momentous centuries...The premise and basic argument are so lucid they seem simple, but the book grows in depth as the centuries pass, showing how multilingualism was suppressed but also how each author's construction of a coterie sedimenting into tradition was artfully selective. Here are new reasons to read and teach together Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Tottel's anthology, and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, plus French authors like Granson and Christine de Pizan, whose contributions were erased by most English authors using them." (Choice) "An important contribution to the literary history of medieval and early modern literature in England. R. D. Perry offers an innovative account of literary formation, a novel way of thinking about coteries as writers whose idea of a communal enterprise makes possible the idea of a 'literature.'" (D. Vance Smith, Princeton University) "This comprehensive account of Chaucer and his imitators in late medieval and sixteenth-century England stands out not only for the novelty of its framing concept-the coterie-but also for its appealing combination of learnedness and readability." (Katherine C. Little, University of Colorado Boulder)
