A literary circle or coterie, according to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, is a "small group of writers (and others) bound together more by friendship and habitual association than by a common literary cause or style that might unite a school or movement. The term often has pejorative connotations of exclusive cliquishness".[1]
A literary circle differs from a writing circle, in that the latter usually includes only writers and the focus is on the process of writing. A literary circle also differs from a literary society, in that the latter need not contain any writers; members of a literary society come together to discuss or celebrate literary works or authors.
Baird, Ileana. Social Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century: Clubs, Literary Salons, Textual Coteries. Academia (Downloadable PDF)
Bowers, Will, and Hannah Leah Crummé, eds. Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie, 1580–1830: From Sidney to Blackwood's. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: tps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54553-4
Fulford, Tim. Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries: The Dialect of the Tribe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518897
Brady, Deirdre F. Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958). Liverpool University Press, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789622461.001.0001
Schellenberg, Betty A. Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture 1740–1790. Cambridge University Press, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316423202.001
Scuriatti, Laura, ed. Groups, Coteries, Circles and Guilds: Modernist Aesthetics and the Utopian Lure of Community. Peter Lang, 2019. DOI:10.3726/b11511