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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... authors, including Donne, cel- ebrated the mean to excess. Yet, as his admonition suggests, the mean was not only a cultural commonplace but also a source of controversy. This book studies English literary representations of means and ...
... authors frequently pre- ferred Aristotelian “mediocrity” to the Stoic ideal of wholly extirpating the emotions ... authors of an eclectic philosophical bent, like Horace and Plutarch, offered nontechnical discussions and represen ...
... authors of different religious, political, and social commitments and backgrounds often espouse the mean as a norm for everyday life. “The golden mean is best” is one of numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth- century proverbs in this vein ...
... authors extended the Aristotelian mean to reli- gious belief and practice. Plutarch influentially treated proper religion as a mean between extremes of superstition and atheism. The Cappadocian church fathers and Augustine conflated ...
... authors treat the mean-extremes contrast in even more diverse and contradictory ways. Working in a variety of genres, they imagine new kinds of means—some idio- syncratic, some highly influential—unlike those deployed in religious and ...
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 |