Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English LiteraturePrinceton University Press, 2009 M02 9 - 376 páginas 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. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 58
... Christian as an ideal.6 Taking up an ancient theme (Cicero, De finibus 5.8.22; Plutarch, Moralia 449a–c; Au- gustine, De civitate dei 14.9), early modern defenders of Stoicism also often minimized its differences from Aristotelianism by ...
... Christian faith.9 Early modern English authors of different religious, political, and social commitments and backgrounds often espouse the mean as a norm for everyday life. “The golden mean is best” is one of numerous sixteenth- and ...
... Christianity as a virtuous mean or “middle way” [mesê hodos, via media] between opposite heresies.21 Drawing upon such formulations, the major rival churches of the Reformation promoted themselves as the virtuous “middle way” between ...
... Christian moderation consistent with reasonable zeal and Arminian “lukewarmness” regarding fun- damentals of faith. Clarifying his distinction, Fuller redefined lukewarmness as an “immoderate unsettledness” that oscillated between ...
... Christian conceptions of the mean-extremes polarity as tools to be exploited rather than commonplaces to be invoked. While many contemporaries use the mean to justify prevailing social and religious formations, in his early poetry Donne ...
Contenido
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 |