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. |
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... providing me with invaluable leave time, and Mary Murrell, Fred Appel, and Henry Krawitz for their editorial efficiency. For advice and aid let me also express my gratitude to Lauren Berlant, Douglas Bruster, Laura Demanksi, Heather ...
... provides a simultaneously innovative and im- mensely influential representation of moderation. Despite his titular theme of loss, Milton presents unfallen Adam and Eve as models of a partially recover- able ideal. Wresting from ...
... provides a compelling case of an early modern figure's self-conscious attempt to articulate an intermediate position with his own literary and philosophical tools. Reimagining the Mean of Courage “Satire 3” is one of three verse satires ...
... provide Donne with satiric examples of how not to seek true religion. Some of the satiric portraits have Juvenalian models, but their careful arrangement recalls Horatian depictions of opposite deviations from the mean rather than ...
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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 |