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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Joshua Scodel. qqqqqqqq. CONTENTS. Acknowledgments and Note on Citations vii Introduction: Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts 1 ... Notes 289 Index 353 This page intentionally left blank qqqqqqqq ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM DEEPLY. qqqqqqqq.
... notes that the panegyrist should praise men's excesses as if they were the proximate virtuous means (1.9.28–29). Many ancient and early modern writ- ers either laud or—more frequently—decry the ability of sophisticated speak- ers or ...
... satires, Donne also expresses a preference for laughter but notes that both responses are extreme: “The extremity of laughing, yea of weeping . . . hath beene accoumpted wisdome: and Democritus and Heraclitus the lovers of 22 CHAPTER ONE.
... notes: “The way to triumph in secular Armies, was not to be slaine in the Battell, but to have kept the station. . . . As it was in the Romane Armies, so it ought to be taught in the Romane Church, Ius legionis facile: Non sequi, non ...
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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 |