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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... aristocratic fashion. In these texts all-consuming erotic obsession, represented either as devotion to one exalted beloved or as unrestrained indulgence in sensual appe- tite, served to distinguish the highborn lover from social ...
... aristocratic excess. In response, Davenant, Dryden, and Behn contrasted interest—depicted as ignoble, mercenary deficiency and as the sordid reality behind claims to moderation—with the noble excess of overpowering erotic passion ...
... aristocrat's superiority over de ́classe ́ self-control. Concurrently one finds a growing dis- dain for the symposiastic tradition on the part of an increasingly “polite” liter- ary and social elite that pursued moderate convivial ...
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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 |