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. |
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... Horace and Plutarch, offered nontechnical discussions and represen- tations of the Aristotelian notion. These ancient ... Horace's case) Epicurean hedonism.8 Drawing on multi- ple pagan sources, various church fathers, including the ...
... Horace (Satires 1.1–1.3 and 2.2–2.3) by invoking the mean. Unlike the satiric Horace, how- ever, Donne does not treat ... Horace's secure stance, evoking a stable moral vision unavailable to Donne and incapable of explaining the most pow ...
... Horace's first satire notes “fixed bounds, beyond and short of which right can find no place” (“certi ... fines ... Horace when arguing that both rulers and subject must keep “power” [potestatem] within “fixed bounds ... beyond and short ...
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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 |