Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature
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A01=Joshua Scodel
Absalom and Achitophel
Areopagitica
Aristotle
Astraea Redux
Author_Joshua Scodel
British literature
Category=DSBC
Category=DSBD
Category=QDHA
Category=QDHF
Cavalier poet
Colloquies
Counter-Reformation
Critical Essays (Orwell)
Early modern Britain
Early Modern English
Early Modern literature
Edmund Gosse
Edmund Spenser
Effeminacy
English Baroque
English poetry
English Renaissance
English Revolution
Epigram
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Extremism
G. (novel)
Georgics
Golden mean (philosophy)
Henry Wotton
Histriomastix
Horace
Imperialism
John Donne
John Harington (writer)
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
Momus
Narcissism
Oliver Cromwell
Patriarchalism
Pelagianism
Persius
Petrarch
Petrarchan sonnet
Phrygius
Poetaster
Poetry
Postmodernism
Prudentius
Puritans
Restoration literature
Robert Greene (dramatist)
Satire
Scholasticism
Sexual Desire (book)
Shakespeare's sonnets
Sonnet sequence
Superiority (short story)
The English Gentleman
Theodicy
Utilitarianism
William Shakespeare
Product details
- ISBN 9780691090283
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 24 Mar 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 "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. 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.
Joshua Scodel is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The English Poetic Epitoph.
