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
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... pleasurable restraint and self-respect that his coun- trymen have ignored to their peril. Such literary adaptations and transforma- tions of an ancient opposition figure centrally in the emergence of a deeply divided, ambivalent, yet ...
... pleasures condemned by conventional moralists. Writers also promote new activities, such as Baconian scientific in- vestigation, with their own rules regarding means and extremes. Thus, early modern English authors deploy the mean to ...
... pleasure and religious, Galenic, and mercantil- ist exhortations to observe the mean in wine drinking; between elite and popular modes of indulgence; and between diverse religious positions both within and outside the English church. As ...
... pleasure and poetic inspiration that is also potentially excessive. His Caroline disciples simplify his legacy in one respect by defiantly celebrating ... pleasure that diverge from Anacreontic-Horatian models of pleasurable 16 INTRODUCTION.
Joshua Scodel. siastic and erotic pleasure that diverge from Anacreontic-Horatian models of pleasurable contentment ... pleasure. Adam and Eve's pleasurable restraint is grounded in their virtuous self-respect, repre- sented as an ...
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 |