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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... MODERATION IN LITERATURE. 3. LITERATURE AND SOCIETY—ENGLAND— HISTORY—16TH CENTURY. 4. LITERATURE AND SOCIETY—ENGLAND—HISTORY—17TH CENTURY. 5. DIDACTIC LITERATURE, ENGLISH—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 6. ENGLISH LITERATURE—CLASSICAL INFLUENCES ...
... Moderation, Temperate Climate, and National Ethos from Spenser to Milton 79 4. Concord, Conquest, and Commerce from Spenser to Cowley 111 PART THREE Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts 143 5. Passionate Extremes and Noble ...
... moderation,” often equated with the Aristotelian mean.11 The popularity of books on courtesy and manners, both homegrown and trans- lated from continental sources, attests to the massive early modern concern with the regulation of ...
... moderation,” Ward preferred the former to deficient “lukewarmnesse,” the worse of the “two extremities.”26 The palpa- ble tension in Ward between Aristotelian norms and Puritan zeal prefigured the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown into ...
... moderation during the Restoration expressed, sometimes explic- itly, the ever-present fear on all sides of renewed civil war. During the civil war and Interregnum, such calls dramatically failed to preserve unity, and it is true, as ...
Contents
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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 |