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 83
... 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 to ancient Rome, georgic poets laud the nation as ...
... passions were incapable of moderation and therefore must be extirpated, Seneca also claimed that virtue is in all things a mean between excess and deficiency (De beneficiis 2.16.2).7 Other widely read and admired classical authors of an ...
... passions, and national identities. Niklas Luhmann has characterized the complexity of modern societies in terms of relatively autonomous discursive “systems.” Luhmann argues that the modern period, broadly defined, witnesses an ...
... passion in ways that challenge early mod- ern English ethical discourse, with its calls for Aristotelian moderation in love. Symposiastic poets draw upon Anacreontic and Horatian depictions of both moderation and excess in drinking ...
... passion. In so doing they undermined a key premise of the early modern gender hierarchy—the superiority of rational, self-controlled males to passionate, prone-to-excess females—and contested the traditional identification of men's ...
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 |