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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... tion and aroused hermeneutic suspicion. In his Rhetoric, when he is concerned with rhetorical efficacy rather than ethical discernment, Aristotle himself notes that the panegyrist should praise men's excesses as if they were the ...
... tion conceived of as a vague but normative mean between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.29 The constitutional and religious turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis (1679– 1681) arguably witnessed the earliest formation of political parties ...
... tion.46 Nevertheless, early modern authors who work in widely recognized, traditional genres or “historical kinds” (to use Alastair Fowler's term) selfconsciously evoke, by both similarities and differences, the longstanding ge- neric ...
... tion of party poetry with the Cavaliers: he celebrates a temperate pleasure appropriate for supporters rather than opponents of the Parliamentary-Puritan revolution. In so doing Milton distances himself from the excesses not only of ...
... tion and who sought to reconcile traditional norms of conjugal moderation with opposed claims for intense passion. Furthermore, Milton's focus on a mean of self-respect as the foundation of self-restraint was profoundly in tune with the ...
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 |