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. |
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Resultados 1-5 de 72
... desire. Behn, by contrast, transvalued conventional norms by depicting passion as rendering both genders passively—but gloriously—“feminine.” In contrast to his Caroline dramas, which located ideal love at court, Dave- nant's ...
... desires for what one does not have and fosters contentment with one's circumstances. In some of the most complex and var- ied drinking poems of the mid-seventeenth century, Robert Herrick simultane- ously continues the Jonsonian ...
... desires to regulate rather than suppress his emotions properly as he confronts contemporary sins. The rest of the verse paragraph continues to stress the dangers of extremism by depicting these sins as Aristotelian extremes. Complaining ...
... desire to escape from life through suicide (NE 3.7.13), Donne's paradox de- flates the norm of traditional military heroism by condemning all who court death as simultaneously reckless and cowardly suicides: whoever “run[s] to death ...
... desire for knowledge, whether cognitive or erotic. Responding to the epistemological uncertainty caused by the diversity of philosophical sects, the ancient Skeptics sought tranquility by eschewing all doctrines; Phrygius responds to ...
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 |