Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature 1st Edition by Joshua Scodel ISBN 978-0691090283 0691090289

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Product details: 

ISBN 10:  0691090289

ISBN 13:  978-0691090283

Author: Joshua Scodel 

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.

Table of contents: 

PART ONE: Two Early Modern Revisions of the Mean

• CHAPTER ONE: Donne and the Personal Mean

• CHAPTER TWO: “Mediocrities” and “Extremities”: Baconian Flexibility and the Aristotelian Mean

PART TWO: Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic

• CHAPTER THREE: Moderation, Temperate Climate, and National Ethos from Spenser to Milton

• CHAPTER FOUR: Concord, Conquest, and Commerce from Spenser to Cowley

PART THREE: Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts

• CHAPTER FIVE: Passionate Extremes and Noble Natures from Elizabethan to Caroline Literature

• CHAPTER SIX: Erotic Excess versus Interest in Mid- to Late-Seventeenth-Century Literature

PART FOUR: Moderation and Excess in the Seventeenth-Century Symposiastic Lyric

• CHAPTER SEVEN: Drinking and the Politics of Poetic Identity from Jonson to Herrick

• CHAPTER EIGHT: Drinking and Cultural Conflict from Lovelace to Rochester

PART FIVE: Reimagining Moderation: The Miltonic Example

• CHAPTER NINE: Paradise Lost, Pleasurable Restraint, and the Mean of Self-Respect

POSTSCRIPT

• Sublime Excess, Dull Moderation, and Contemporary Ambivalence

NOTES

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