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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... drunken violence, sometimes for a harmless drunkenness as a way of attaining poetic rapture or escape from mortal cares. English poets who adapt and transform ancient symposiastic poetry participate in major cultural conflicts of the ...
... drunken revelry with Stoic contentment, Lovelace's greatest poem, “The Grasse-hopper,” suggests that symposiastic tradition has internal answers to its own excesses. Yet with mounting despair among Cavalier poets that they could do no ...
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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 |