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 87
... poems creatively appropriate Horatian satire and epistle. Early modern georgic poets diversely respond to their Virgilian model, which identified the mean with a farmer-soldier uneasily poised between rural idyll and imperial expansions ...
... poem strove to reconnect the erotic and political realms. In his political and religious verse Dryden responded to ... poetic rapture or escape from mortal cares. English poets who adapt and transform ancient symposiastic poetry ...
... poem, “The Grasse-hopper,” suggests that symposiastic tradition has internal answers to its own excesses. Yet with mounting despair among Cavalier poets that they could do no more than ignobly survive, a nonclassical vulgarity also ...
... poem in Tottel's Miscellany presents a “carelesse” man “scorning” the servitude of love, while the Jacobean courtier- poet Robert Ayton asks a woman who “careless prove[s]” why she pretends to “love.” In a poem ascribed to Virgil by ...
... poem exhorts men to “know” the limits of earthly power: “That thou may'st rightly'obey power, her bounds know; / Those past, her nature, and name's chang'd; to be / Then humble to her is idolatrie” (ll. 100–102). Donne's formulation ...
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 |