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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... praise of Mediocrity,” cautioned John Donne in a 1625 sermon.1 With a destabilizing paradox, Donne invoked the venerable norm of “mediocrity” or the “golden mean” to warn his contemporaries against the danger of overuse. Twenty-first ...
... praise of moderation as the source of sociopolitical concord and celebrations of diverse sorts of extremism (chapter 4). By closely associating the temperate farmer with the imperial soldier as the foundations of Roman regeneration ...
... praising the temperate life, Denham and his heirs aspire to a sublimity worthy of English ambitions and achievements. By making the georgic a self-conscious expression of their nation's immoderate modernity—and its discontents ...
... praise both himself and the lower orders in defiance of Puritan killjoys. Acknowledging but seeking to minimize the negative implications of social fragmentation, he portrays alehouse revels and neoclassical symposia as distinctive but ...
... praise the third's embrace of the English middle way. After satirizing the first two figures as extremes, however, Donne pointedly refuses to treat the third as the mean. Mirrheus chooses Catholicism, Crants his Cal- vinism on the basis ...
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 |