Autor(en)

Scodel, Joshua:

Verlag / Jahr

Princeton ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2002.

Format / Einband

Original cloth with dust jacket. VIII, 367 p.

Sprache

Englisch

Gewicht

ca. 680 g

ISBN

0691090289

EAN

9780691090283

Bestell-Nr

1171362

Bemerkungen

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slightly rubbed jacket, slightly skewed spine, otherwise very good and clean. / Leicht beriebene Jacke, leicht schiefer Rücken, sonst sehr gut und sauber. - Contents: 1. Two Early Modern Revisions of the Mean -- 2. Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic -- 3. Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts -- 4. Moderation and Excess in the Seventeenth-Century Symposiastic Lyric -- 5. Reimagining Moderation: The Miltonic Example. - 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 modem 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 of 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. ISBN 9780691090283

Unser Preis

EUR 62,00

(inkl. MwSt.)

Versandkostenfrei innerhalb Deutschlands

Aufgenommen mit whBOOK

Sicheres Bestellen - Order-Control geprüft!