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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... farmer, poet, or king?). Authors proclaim as virtuously moderate or admi- rably excessive erotic and homosocial pleasures condemned by conventional moralists. Writers also promote new activities, such as Baconian scientific in ...
... farmer-soldier uneasily poised between rural idyll and imperial expansions. Authors of erotic literature imitate continental genres such as the Petrarchan sonnet, the chivalric romance, and Neoplato- nizing pastoral romance that glorify ...
... farmer or a surro- gate—including, most importantly, the georgic poet himself—with the golden mean and represent him as a national ideal. In so doing they challenge identi- fications of the nation with the monarchy and court. Georgic ...
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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 |