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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... Jonson to Herrick 199 8. Drinking 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 ...
... Jonson: the anti-Aristotelian identification of heavy drinking itself with moderation insofar as it curtails unruly desires for what one does not have and fosters contentment with one's circumstances. In some of the most complex and var ...
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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 |