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 73
... attacked opponents as hypo- critical representatives of a vicious extreme by, for example, equating Armini- ans with papists or Calvinists with sectarians. Many opposed Charles I and proceeded, however reluctantly, into civil war ...
... attacking those per- ceived as insufficiently committed as “trimmers” (a term invented during the Exclusion Crisis as a political analogue of Laodiceans).30 As literary scholars have shown, John Dryden's brilliant appeals to the via ...
... attacks on trimming) must be situated within the highly propagandistic rhetorical milieu of the Restoration.31 Calls for moderation during the Restoration expressed, sometimes explic- itly, the ever-present fear on all sides of renewed ...
... attacks the generally commended notion of “mixt Monarchy” as a cause of civil war, the epistle describes his treatise as placed in the virtuous but vulnerable mean between those that “contend on one side for too great Liberty, and on ...
... attacks others with sword or “poysonous words” (ll. 18, 28). Thus Donne, the love poet and (prob- ably soon-to-be) participant in the 1596 Cadiz expedition, castigates his own extreme impulses. The imagery of hot and cold used to ...
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 |