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 59
... philosophical bent, like Horace and Plutarch, offered nontechnical discussions and represen- tations of the Aristotelian notion. These ancient authors encouraged early modern syncretism by associating the mean with values originally ...
... philosophers call a “fuzzy” concept, whose borders are hard to define.17 Aris- totle, who emphasizes from the outset that ethical theory is perforce inexact in its general formulations and even more sketchy regarding particular cases of ...
... philosopher of the period, ad- dressed the longstanding laments concerning rhetorical manipulations of the mean by rejecting Aristotle's notion of ethical virtue as a “mediocrity.” Hobbes replaced the Aristotelian concept with his own ...
... philosophical tenets and values. Religious, political, and literary historians who have discussed the via media often treat the classical formulations as inert “background.” This book, by contrast, examines how early modern authors ...
... philosophical tradition in which the concept received its most sustained elab- oration but also with diverse generic traditions in which the concept was imaginatively applied to different features of individual and social life. This ...
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 |