Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature

Released on by Joshua Scodel
preview-18

  • Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature Book Detail

  • Author : Joshua Scodel
  • Release Date : 2009-02-09
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Genre : Literary Criticism
  • Pages : 375
  • ISBN 13 : 1400824931
  • File Size : 40,40 MB
DOWNLOAD BOOK

Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature by Joshua Scodel PDF Summary

Book Description: 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.

Disclaimer: www.yourbookbest.com does not own Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature books pdf, neither created or scanned. We just provide the link that is already available on the internet, public domain and in Google Drive. If any way it violates the law or has any issues, then kindly mail us via contact us page to request the removal of the link.

Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England

Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England

File Size : 5,5 MB
Total View : 2568 Views
DOWNLOAD

Explores how power is shaped and negotiated in later Anglo-Saxon texts, focusing on how hierarchical, vertical structures are presented alongside patterns of re

The Work of Form

The Work of Form

File Size : 74,74 MB
Total View : 8272 Views
DOWNLOAD

The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture explores the resurgent interest in literary form and aesthetics in early modern english studie

Forms of Engagement

Forms of Engagement

File Size : 32,32 MB
Total View : 2329 Views
DOWNLOAD

What does it mean for a woman to write an elegy, ode, epic, or blazon in the seventeenth century? How does their reading affect women's use of particular poetic