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 55
... avoiding both excessive grief and inhuman, Stoic insensibility—left intense disagreement among English moral guides about precisely how much mourning was appropriate.19 More significantly, the mean's imprecision encouraged polemical ...
... avoid this troubling question, some strenuously sought to realign virtuous zeal with the mean, Laodiceanism with extremism. For example, in the heated days of 1642 Thomas Fuller distinguished between a Christian moderation consistent ...
... avoided extremes of monarchical tyranny and mob rule.34 In 1650, for example, Marchamont Nedham associated the political middle way with a republic rather than a mixed monarchy. Positioning the Common- wealth regime as the virtuous mean ...
... avoid such emotional extremes. Donne's rejection of laughter and weeping sounds Stoic. Seneca argues that the wise man should “calmly” accept human faults without either laughing or weeping because he should not trouble himself with ...
... avoid death by renouncing his philosophic mis- sion, just as he refuses to embrace death (61c). In De senectute Cicero intro- duces the prohibition of suicide by noting that old men should no more avidly seek than violently reject ...
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 |