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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... and the Mean of Self-Respect 255 Postscript: Sublime Excess, Dull Moderation, and Contemporary Ambivalence 285 Notes 289 Index 353 This page intentionally left blank qqqqqqqq ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM DEEPLY. qqqqqqqq. Contents.
... clashing treatments of means and extremes continue to resonate within contemporary cultural debates. The Classical Mean in Early Modern England The social and. qqqqqqqq. Introduction: Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts.
... contemporary Thomas Hobbes, the most brilliant and most reviled political philosopher of the period, ad- dressed the longstanding laments concerning rhetorical manipulations of the mean by rejecting Aristotle's notion of ethical virtue ...
... contemporary writers more flexibly deploy the mean-extremes distinction to explore the complex relationship between the individual, on the one hand, and national religious and sociopolitical forma- tions, on the other. They use the mean ...
... contemporary ethics. Miltonic self-respect, I argue, remains a recognizable ideal in liberal tradition down to our own time. This study tries to recover, with both sympathy and rigor, the often strange modes of thought and imagination ...
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 |