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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... CRITICISM. 2. MODERATION IN LITERATURE. 3. LITERATURE AND SOCIETY—ENGLAND— HISTORY—16TH CENTURY. 4. LITERATURE AND SOCIETY—ENGLAND—HISTORY—17TH CENTURY. 5. DIDACTIC LITERATURE, ENGLISH—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 6. ENGLISH LITERATURE ...
... critics. Yet the Sons of Ben also revive an ancient symposiastic motif ignored by Jonson: the anti-Aristotelian identification of heavy drinking itself with moderation insofar as it curtails unruly desires for what one does not have and ...
... critics have celebrated. In Renaissance Self-Fash- ioning Stephen Greenblatt famously discovered no instances of “pure unfet- tered subjectivity” in the English Renaissance but only “human subject[s]” who were “remarkably unfree.”3 Both ...
... critics accused them of escap- ing superstition only by going to the opposite extreme of “carelesse” irreligion. Plutarch claimed that the Epicureans, like Phrygius, foolishly spurned religious faith in order to be “fearelesse and ...
... Critics of Epicureans and Skeptics accused them of cutting off natural human (i.e., male) cognitive and erotic impulses and, consequently, of advocating self-emasculation. The Skeptic Archesilaus mocked his Epicurean rivals for making ...
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 |