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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... king and subject from extremes.33 After the regicide, Parliamentarians of vari- ous stripes continued to call for a constitutional balance that avoided extremes of monarchical tyranny and mob rule.34 In 1650, for example, Marchamont ...
... 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- vestigation, with their ...
... King Lear, after Cordelia refuses to pledge all her love to her father, the enraged Lear exclaims, “Here I disclaim all my paternal care . . . /.../ And as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee ... for ever.” In “A Lecture upon the ...
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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 |