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 45
... opposite heresies.21 Drawing upon such formulations, the major rival churches of the Reformation promoted themselves as the virtuous “middle way” between (variously de- scribed) extremes.22 Early modern Englishmen similarly applied the ...
... opposite stylistic vices (Rhetoric 3.3.3, 3.8.1–3, 3.9.6, 3.12.6), a practice subsequently adopted by numerous ancient authors.45 Such analogies and parallels between ethical and aesthetic norms encouraged early modern English authors ...
... opposites. Yet such accounts generally treat early modern texts as enacting or dramatizing relations between selves and their culture that the contemporary scholar must theorize and thereby retrospectively clarify.4 By contrast, Donne's ...
... distinction between these extremes by arguing that rash men are generally “rash cowards” (“thrasudeiloi,” NE 3.7.9) who exemplify Aristotle's view that vicious men often combine opposite extremes because they DONNE AND THE PERSONAL MEAN 23.
... opposite extremes, Donne laments that he is “ridlingly distemperd, cold and hott” (l. 7). The explorers and ad- venturers who use their internal “fire to thaw the ice / Of frozen North discov- eries” (ll. 21–22) and endure “fires of ...
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 |