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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... EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE / JOSHUA SCODEL P. CM. (LITERATURE IN HISTORY SERIES) INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. ISBN 0-691-09028-9 (ACID-FREE PAPER) 1. ENGLISH LITERATURE—EARLY MODERN, 1500–1700—HISTORY AND ...
... early modern authors, including Donne, cel- ebrated the mean to excess. Yet, as his admonition suggests, the mean was not only a cultural ... Early Modern England The social and. qqqqqqqq. Introduction: Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts.
Joshua Scodel. The Classical Mean in Early Modern England The social and intellectual elite of early modern England often espoused Aris- totle's definition, most fully developed in his Nicomachean Ethics, of ethical virtues as habits ...
... Early modern English authors of different religious, political, and social commitments and backgrounds often espouse the mean as a norm for ... early modern exhortations that one should observe the mean ANCIENT PARADIGMS, MODERN CONFLICTS 3.
... early modern writ- ers either laud or—more frequently—decry the ability of sophisticated speak- ers or social groups (courtiers were a favorite early modern instance) to deni- grate virtuous means as their proximate extremes and 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 |