Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English LiteraturePrinceton University Press, 09/02/2009 - 376 من الصفحات 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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... underscores their extremism. Reversing con- ventional depictions of military men as boldly active and of lovers as meekly passive in order to emphasize the mad excesses of both, Donne opens with a soldier who entombs himself in “ships ...
... underscores that the typical English conform- ist, who thinks precisely what the authorities “bid him thinke” (l. 57), has forfeited his identity to the powers that be. The first triad thus fails to locate a positive model. Having ...
... underscores that Phrygius, who fears to join a church, is “less” than a man. Donne's likening of Phrygius to a marriage- shy bachelor makes the accusation of self-emasculation particularly apt: one may compare Erasmus's colloquy “Proci ...
... underscores his own Graccus's extreme lability regarding objects of desire. Finally, the Donnean Graccus's flimsy reasoning that women who go in “divers habits” are nevertheless of the same “kind” takes on redoubled irony when one ...
... underscores the distinction in gender terms, for his exhortation that the male inquirer struggle hard to “reach” and “winne” the feminine figure of “Truth” (ll. 79–82) sharply opposes his “masculine” urge to Phrygius's “effeminate ...
المحتوى
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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 |