Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition - From Chaucer to Spenser

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 r