Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (eBook)

Joshua Scodel (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2009 | 1. Auflage
376 Seiten
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4008-2493-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Joshua Scodel is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth and has published numerous articles on various aspects of Renaissance literature.

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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 "e;golden means"e; 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. Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.2.2009
• Reihe/Serie: Literature in History
• Reihe/Serie: Literature in History
• Verlagsort: Princeton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie Altertum / Antike
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie des Mittelalters
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Absalom and Achitophel • Anglo-Dutch Wars • Antithesis • areopagitica • Aristotle • Astraea Redux • British Literature • Cato the Younger • Cavalier poet • colloquies • Correction (novel) • Counter-Reformation • Critical Essays (Orwell) • Early Modern Britain • Early Modern English • Early Modern Europe • Early Modern Literature • early modern period • Edmund Gosse • Edmund Spenser • effeminacy • England in 1819 • English Baroque • English law • english poetry • English Renaissance • English Revolution • Epigram • Ethnocentrism • Extremism • Francis Bacon (artist) • George Etherege • Georgics • Gluttony • G. (novel) • Golden mean (philosophy) • Henry Wotton • Historicism • Histriomastix • Horace • hyperbole • Iconoclasm • imperialism • jeremiad • John Donne • John Harington (writer) • John Ponet • John Suckling (poet) • jouissance • Juvenal • King Lear • Laudianism • Liberalism • Libertine • Literary Theory • Literature • literature and revolution • Lucretius • Marprelate Controversy • Milton's divorce tracts • Modern Moral Philosophy • Modern Philology • Momus • Narcissism • Nathaniel Lee • Nicholas Barbon • Oliver Cromwell • Patriarchalism • pelagianism • Persius • petrarch • Petrarchan Sonnet • Philosophy • Phrygius • Poetaster • Poetry • Postmodernism • post-structuralism • Promiscuity • Prudentius • Puritans • Pyrrhonism • Radicalism (historical) • Restoration literature • Richard Hooker • Robert Greene (dramatist) • Satire • SCHOLASTICISM • Sententiae • Sexual Desire (book) • Shakespeare's sonnets • Sir Thomas Elyot • Sonnet 36 • sonnet sequence • Superiority (short story) • The English Gentleman • Theodicy • The Philosopher • Utilitarianism • William Shakespeare
• ISBN-10: 1-4008-2493-1 / 1400824931
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4008-2493-9 / 9781400824939