Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English LiteraturePrinceton University Press, 09.02.2009 - 376 Seiten This 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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... verse, fiction, and drama. I focus particularly on works that reward close reading because of their complex allusive relationships to classical models, self-aware handling of language, and often rich sense of literary genre. Engaging ...
... verse in particular gave writers flexibility with respect to communal values. Early modern representations of the mean-extremes opposition engage in dialogue not only with the ancient philosophical tradition in which the concept ...
... verse Dryden responded to successive crises by espousing a pro-court version of mod- eration. Yet in his dramas Dryden, like Behn in various genres, celebrated with lofty rhetoric and sublime images a private sphere of extreme passion ...
... verse that he emu- lates. Yet Milton's godly sonnets were not influential. During the Restoration Tories adapt Brome's drunken contempt for thinking to declare loyalty to the monarchy, which the happy tippler will not trouble, while ...
... verse epistle to Sir Henry Wotton, “Sir, more than kisses,” Donne eschews this common deployment of the mean to glorify a fixed position in the social hierarchy— the middle state—and instead advances a mean that justifies a socially ...
Inhalt
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 |