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
Results 1-5 of 59
... Donne and the Personal Mean 21 2. “Mediocrities” and “Extremities”: Baconian Flexibility and the Aristotelian Mean 48 PART TWO Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic 77 3. Moderation, Temperate Climate, and National Ethos from ...
... Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances Malpezzi (Conway, Ark., 1995), 45–60; chapter 2 in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M ...
... Donne in a 1625 sermon.1 With a destabilizing paradox, Donne invoked the venerable norm of “mediocrity” or the “golden mean” to warn his contemporaries against the danger of overuse. Twenty-first-century readers might well conclude that ...
... Donne's highly self-conscious positioning of the English church in his sermons, which draws upon various classical, patristic, and Scholastic formulations to draw polemical distinctions between true and false concep- tions of the ...
... (Donne) or to em- power the individual seeking fulfillment either in struggle for mastery over or in isolation from such institutions (Bacon). While exalting zeal over Laodi- ceanism in his 1640s polemics on church government, in ...
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 |