Registration open for Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions Symposium, Wellington, 14-15 February

This two-day symposium explores the literature of complaint and grievance, centring on the texts of the Renaissance but welcoming contributions from related areas. Shakespeare (A Lover’s Complaint) and Spenser (Complaints) are central authors of Renaissance complaint, but who else wrote complaint literature, why, and to what effect? Female-voiced complaint was fashionable in the high poetic culture of the 1590s, but what happens to complaint when it is taken up by early modern women writers? What forms—and what purposes—does the literature of complaint and grievance take on in non-elite or manuscript spheres, in miscellanies, commonplace books, petitions, street satires, ballads and songs? What are the classical and biblical traditions on which Renaissance complaint is based? And what happens to complaint after the Renaissance, in Romantic poetry, in the reading and writing cultures of the British colonial world, in contemporary poetry, and in the #metoo movement?

Keynotes

  • Professor Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin)
  • Professor Kate Lilley (University of Sydney)
  • Professor Rosalind Smith (University of Newcastle, Australia)

Venue

Rutherford House
Victoria University of Wellington Pipitea Campus, Bunny Street
Wellington, New Zealand.

Registration

Symposium attendance is free. For catering purposes, please register your attendance by Friday 8 February with the convenor, Dr Sarah Ross: Sarah.Ross@vuw.ac.nz

For more information, see the full draft programme downloadable here.