Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English LiteratureThis book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture. |
From inside the book
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... Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire Karen Chase and ...
... Cultural Conflict from Lovelace to Rochester 225 PART FIVE Reimagining Moderation: The Miltonic Example 253 9. Paradise Lost, Pleasurable Restraint, and the Mean of Self-Respect 255 Postscript: Sublime Excess, Dull Moderation, and ...
... cultural commonplace but also a source of controversy. This book studies English literary representations of means and ... culture. In both con- spicuous and subtle ways, furthermore, these clashing treatments of means and extremes ...
... culture among the educated elite, whether con- ceived of according to an old literary historicist Tillyardian model of a shared “world picture,” an (early) new historicist model based upon a Foucauldian episteme or Geertzian seamless ...
... cultural developments foregrounded in this book, I will briefly discuss three aspects that are most relevant to my concerns: the dependence upon longstanding traditions of con- ceptualizing the mean; the malleability of the concept ...
Contents
1 | |
19 | |
Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic | 77 |
Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts | 143 |
Moderation and Excess in the SeventeenthCentury Symposiastic Lyric | 197 |
Reimagining Moderation The Miltonic Example | 253 |
Sublime Excess Dull Moderation and Contemporary Ambivalence | 285 |
Notes | 289 |
Index | 353 |