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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... Restoration even as it changed from a largely Calvinist to a largely Arminian church. Disagree- ments hidden in the vague formulation caused conflicts within the church between Puritans desiring further “reformation” and anti-Puritan ...
... Restoration.31 Calls for moderation during the Restoration expressed, sometimes explic- itly, the ever-present fear on all sides of renewed civil war. During the civil war and Interregnum, such calls dramatically failed to preserve ...
... Restoration georgics partly inspired by Denham, Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley treat virtuous moderation as an increasingly archaic norm while celebrating the growth of national wealth and might through trade and the Royal Navy's ...
... Restoration writers of diverse political and religious positions claimed to be promoting the “public interest,” conceived of as including and balancing the legitimate interests of various political, socioeconomic, and reli- gious groups ...
... Restoration Tories adapt Brome's drunken contempt for thinking to declare loyalty to the monarchy, which the happy tippler will not trouble, while libertines like John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, glory in the feverish pursuit of ...
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 |