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
Results 1-5 of 60
... human empowerment. Erotic literature pits extreme passion against temperate conjugal love; symposiastic or drinking-party poetry extols polemically defined norms of sociable moderation or of intoxicating excess. Imagining a modern rival ...
... human being, neither too much nor too little, rather than seek an apathy impossible in practice as well as inhumane and un-Christian as an ideal.6 Taking up an ancient theme (Cicero, De finibus 5.8.22; Plutarch, Moralia 449a–c; Au ...
... human empowerment. He agrees with con- temporaries that rulers and subjects must adhere to the mean for sociopolitical order. When considering persons as individuals capable of transcending as- cribed sociopolitical roles, however ...
... human dignity. Against the Restoration he detested, Milton portrays pre-fallen Adam and Eve as evidence that self-governance depends upon norms of pleasurable moderation and of self-respect that his nation has ignored. Despite the ...
... humanity. Juvenal's Satire 10 commends both Democritus's laughter and Heraclitus's weeping as wise responses to human frailties. Juvenal presents laughter as more natural, how- ever, thus implicitly associating his poem's stance with ...
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 |