Taking place during the opening week of the Faerie Land exhibition and hosted by the AHRC-funded ‘Poly-Olbion Project’, the Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain two-day conference at the Royal Geographical Society centres attention on Michael Drayton’s great poem of Jacobean national description, the prose annotations written by John Selden, and the unique county maps by William Hole.
Papers, covering all components of the text, will situate Poly-Olbion within contexts of early modern British discourses of space, place, nationhood, and regional identity.
List of Speakers:
Andrew McRae (Exeter), ‘The Poly-Olbion Project’
Sara Trevisan (Brunel), ‘National Ancestry and Cultural Geography in Poly-Olbion’
James Loxley (Edinburgh), ‘Jonson, Drayton and the Mythography of a Binational Britain’
Sukanya Dasgupta (Calcutta), ‘Imagining Britain: Reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles and Poly-Olbion’
Sandra Logan (Michigan State), ‘Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Maritime England and the Free Seas Debate’
Shannon Garner-Balandrin (Northeastern), ‘Curls to Curled Waves: the Poly-Olbion and Michael Drayton’s Female Rivers’
Bernhard Klein (Kent), ‘Poly-Olbion and “those Rough Gods of the Sea”’
Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster), ‘Of merry Robin Hood, and of his merrier men’: Anti-Curial Chorography and Michael Drayton’s ‘Robin Hood’s Story’
Todd Andrew Borlik (Huddersfield), ‘Poly-Olbion, Bio-Regionalism, and the Beating of the Bounds’
Steph Mastoris (National Waterfront Museum), ‘Choices in chorography: Inclusion and omission in Drayton’s account of Nottinghamshire’
Daniel Cattell, ‘Michael Drayton and Britain’s Religious Past’
Robert Smith, ‘Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain in John Trussell’s Touchstone of Tradition’
Esther M. J. van Raamsdonk, ‘British Consciousness, Poly-Olbion and the Travelogue’
Rab MacGibbon (National Portrait Gallery), ‘William Hole: Drayton’s engraver in the context of Prince Henry’s court’
William Porter (Harvard), ‘“By his spatious Maps”: The Cartographic Poly-Olbion’
Sjoerd Levelt (Bilkent), ‘John Selden’s Medieval Chronicles’
Philip Schwyzer (Exeter), ‘Drayton and Selden in Dialogue’
Angus Vine (Stirling), ‘Drayton’s copious chorography’
Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), ‘The Problems of Reading The Landscape’
Location:
The Royal Geographical Society
1 Kensington Gore,
London,
SW7 2AR.