| | TABLE OF CONTENTS: Acknowledgments and Note on Citations vii
Introduction: Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts 1
PART ONE: Two Early Modern Revisions of the Mean 19
1. Donne and the Personal Mean 21
2. "Mediocrities "and "Extremities ": Baconian Flexibility and the Aristotelian Mean 48
PART TWO: Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic 77
3. Moderation,Temperate Climate,and National Ethos from Spenser to Milton 79
4. Concord, Conquest, and Commerce from Spenser to Cowley 111
PART THREE: Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts 143
5. Passionate Extremes and Noble Natures from Elizabethan to Caroline Literature 145
6. Erotic Excess versus Interest in Mid-to Late-Seventeenth-Century Literature 170
PART FOUR: Moderation and Excess in the Seventeenth-Century Symposiastic Lyric 197
7. Drinking and the Politics of Poetic Identity from Jonson to Herrick 199
8. Drinking and Cultural Conflict from Lovelace to Rochester 225
PART FIVE: Reimagining Moderation:The Miltonic Example 253
9. Paradise Lost ,Pleasurable Restraint, and the Mean of Self-Respect 255
Postscript: Sublime Excess, Dull Moderation, and Contemporary Ambivalence 285
Notes 289
Index 353
Return to Book Description File created: 11/5/2009 |
