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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... treat the mean-extremes contrast in even more diverse and contradictory ways. Working in a variety of genres, they imagine new kinds of means—some idio- syncratic, some highly influential—unlike those deployed in religious and con ...
... treat persons as partici- pants in diverse subsystems with distinctive standards and rules. Bacon, for example, applies means and extremes differently when he considers persons as political subjects or members of the national church, on ...
... treat the classical formulations as inert “background.” This book, by contrast, examines how early modern authors articulated the distinctiveness of their period and their individual positions by the energizing appropriation and ...
... treat virtuous moderation as an increasingly archaic norm while celebrating the growth of national wealth and might through trade and the Royal Navy's exploits. While the georgic traditionally employed a “middle” style appropriate for ...
... treat the mean as an unproblematic norm. Near the end of both his second and fourth satires, he uses the mean-extremes polarity to treat issues or characters peripheral to the central issues that he confronts. Both passages allude ...
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 |