Excess And The Mean In Early Modern English Literature

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Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature

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

Author : Joshua Scodel
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2009-02-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781400824939

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

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.

Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature

Jennifer C. Vaught
Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature Book PDF

Author : Jennifer C. Vaught
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351919395

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Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature by Jennifer C. Vaught Pdf

The first full length treatment of how men of different professions, social ranks and ages are empowered by their emotional expressiveness in early modern English literary works, this study examines the profound impact of the cultural shift in the English aristocracy from feudal warriors to emotionally expressive courtiers or gentlemen on all kinds of men in early modern English literature. Jennifer Vaught bases her analysis on the epic, lyric, and romance as well as on drama, pastoral writings and biography, by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson and Garrick among other writers. Offering new readings of these works, she traces the gradual emergence of men of feeling during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the blossoming of this literary version of manhood during the eighteenth century.

Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature

Alison Chapman
Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature Book PDF

Author : Alison Chapman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2013-01-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135132316

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Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature by Alison Chapman Pdf

This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.

The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature

David Loewenstein,Janel M. Mueller
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature Book PDF

Author : David Loewenstein,Janel M. Mueller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 1064 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0521631564

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The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature by David Loewenstein,Janel M. Mueller Pdf

Now available in paperback, this is the first full-scale history of early modern English literature in nearly a century. It offers new perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters address recent methodological and interpretive developments in English literary studies. The book has five sections: Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation, and Reception , The Tudor Era from the Reformation to Elizabeth I , The Era of Elizabeth and James VI , The Earlier Stuart Era , and The Civil War and Commonwealth Era . While England is the principal focus, literary production in Scotland, Ireland and Wales is treated, as are other subjects less frequently examined in previous histories, including women s writings and the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution. This innovatively-designed history is an essential resource for specialists and students.

The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature

Peter Remien
The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature Book PDF

Author : Peter Remien
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2019-02-14
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781108496810

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The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature by Peter Remien Pdf

Participates in an intellectual history of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of nature in the early modern period.

Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England

Alison V. Scott
Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England Book PDF

Author : Alison V. Scott
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2016-05-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317104377

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Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England by Alison V. Scott Pdf

Exploring the idea of luxury in relation to a series of neighboring but distinct concepts including avarice, excess, licentiousness, indulgence, vitality, abundance, and waste, this study combines intellectual and cultural historical methods to trace discontinuities in luxury’s conceptual development in seventeenth-century England. The central argument is that, as ’luxury’ was gradually Englished in seventeenth-century culture, it developed political and aesthetic meanings that connect with eighteenth-century debates even as they oppose their so-called demoralizing thrust. Alison Scott closely examines the meanings of luxury in early modern English culture through literary and rhetorical uses of the idea. She argues that, while ’luxury’ could and often did denote merely ’lust’ or ’licentiousness’ as it tends to be glossed by modern editors of contemporary works, its cultural lexicon was in fact more complex and fluid than that at this time. Moreover, that fuller understanding of its plural and shifting meanings-as they are examined here-has implications for the current intellectual history of the idea in Western thought. The existing narrative of luxury’s conceptual development is one of progressive upward transformation, beginning with the rise of economic liberalism amidst eighteenth-century debates; it is one that assumes essential continuity between the medieval treatment of luxury as the sin of ’luxuria’ and early modern notions of the idea even as social practises of luxury explode in early seventeenth-century culture.

Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England

Mark Hailwood
Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England Book PDF

Author : Mark Hailwood
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781843839422

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Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England by Mark Hailwood Pdf

This book provides a history of the alehouse between the years 1550 and 1700, the period during which it first assumed its long celebrated role as the key site for public recreation in the villages and market towns of England. In the face of considerable animosity from Church and State, the patrons of alehouses, who were drawn from a wide cross section of village society, fought for and won a central place in their communities for an institution that they cherished as a vital facilitator of what they termed "good fellowship". For them, sharing a drink in the alehouse was fundamental to the formation of social bonds, to the expression of their identity, and to the definition of communities, allegiances and friendships. Bringing together social and cultural history approaches, this book draws on a wide range of source material - from legal records and diary evidence to printed drinking songs - to investigate battles over alehouse licensing and the regulation of drinking; the political views and allegiances that ordinary men and women expressed from the alebench; the meanings and values that drinking rituals and practices held for contemporaries; and the social networks and collective identities expressed through the choice of drinking companions. Focusing on an institution and a social practice at the heart of everyday life in early modern England, this book allows us to see some of the ways in which ordinary men and women responded to historical processes such as religious change and state formation, and just as importantly reveals how they shaped their own communities and collective identities. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, cultural and political worlds of the ordinary men and women of seventeenth-century England. MARK HAILWOOD is Lecturer in Early Modern British History at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford.

Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700

Ingo Berensmeyer
Literary Culture in Early Modern England 1630 1700 Book PDF

Author : Ingo Berensmeyer
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-06-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783110691405

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Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 by Ingo Berensmeyer Pdf

This book explores literary culture in England between 1630 and 1700, focusing on connections between material, epistemic, and political conditions of literary writing and reading. In a number of case studies and close readings, it presents the seventeenth century as a period of change that saw a fundamental shift towards a new cultural configuration: neoclassicism. This shift affected a wide array of social practices and institutions, from poetry to politics and from epistemology to civility.

The Plague Epic in Early Modern England

Rebecca Totaro
The Plague Epic in Early Modern England Book PDF

Author : Rebecca Totaro
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2016-02-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317021315

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The Plague Epic in Early Modern England by Rebecca Totaro Pdf

The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 presents together, for the first time, modernized versions of ten of the most poignant of plague poems in the English language - each composed in heroic verse and responding to the urgent need to justify the ways of God in times of social, religious, and political upheaval. Showcasing unusual combinations of passion and restraint, heart-rending lamentation and nation-building fervor, these poems function as literary memorials to the plague-time fallen. In an extended introduction, Rebecca Totaro makes the case that these poems belong to a distinct literary genre that she calls the 'plague epic.' Because the poems are formally and thematically related to Milton's great epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, this volume represents a rare discovery of previously unidentified sources of great value for Milton studies and scholarly research into the epic, didactic verse, cultural studies of the seventeenth century, illness as metaphor, and interdisciplinary approaches to illness, natural disaster, trauma, and memory.

Prodigality in Early Modern Drama

Ezra Horbury
Prodigality in Early Modern Drama Book PDF

Author : Ezra Horbury
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2019
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9781843845423

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Prodigality in Early Modern Drama by Ezra Horbury Pdf

Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher.

Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England

Rebecca Lemon
Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England Book PDF

Author : Rebecca Lemon
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2018-02-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780812294811

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Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England by Rebecca Lemon Pdf

Rebecca Lemon illuminates a previously-buried conception of addiction, as a form of devotion at once laudable, difficult, and extraordinary, that has been concealed by the persistent modern link of addiction to pathology. Surveying sixteenth-century invocations, she reveals how early moderns might consider themselves addicted to study, friendship, love, or God. However, she also uncovers their understanding of addiction as a form of compulsion that resonates with modern scientific definitions. Specifically, early modern medical tracts, legal rulings, and religious polemic stressed the dangers of addiction to alcohol in terms of disease, compulsion, and enslavement. Yet the relationship between these two understandings of addiction was not simply oppositional, for what unites these discourses is a shared emphasis on addiction as the overthrow of the will. Etymologically, "addiction" is a verbal contract or a pledge, and even as sixteenth-century audiences actively embraced addiction to God and love, writers warned against commitment to improper forms of addiction, and the term became increasingly associated with disease and tyranny. Examining canonical texts including Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, Henry IV, and Othello alongside theological, medical, imaginative, and legal writings, Lemon traces the variety of early modern addictive attachments. Although contemporary notions of addiction seem to bear little resemblance to its initial meanings, Lemon argues that the early modern period's understanding of addiction is relevant to our modern conceptions of, and debates about, the phenomenon.

Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic

Hillary Eklund
Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic Book PDF

Author : Hillary Eklund
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2016-03-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317104445

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Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic by Hillary Eklund Pdf

Grounded in the literary history of early modern England, this study explores the intersection of cultural attitudes and material practices that shape the acquisition, circulation, and consumption of resources at the turn of the seventeenth century. Considering a formally diverse and ideologically rich array of texts from the period - including drama, poetry, and prose, as well as travel narrative and early modern political and literary theory - this book shows how ideas about what is considered 'enough' adapt to changing material conditions and how cultural forces shape those adaptations. Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic traces how early modern English authors improvised new models of sufficiency that pushed back the threshold of excess to the frontier of the known world itself. The book argues that standards of economic sufficiency as expressed through literature moved from subsistence toward the increasing pursuit of plenty through plunder, trade, and plantation. Author Hillary Eklund describes what it means to have enough in the moral economies of eating, travel, trade, land use and public policy.

Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603

Per Sivefors
Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire 1590 1603 Book PDF

Author : Per Sivefors
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-02-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000047899

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Representing Masculinity in Early Modern English Satire, 1590–1603 by Per Sivefors Pdf

Engaging with Elizabethan understandings of masculinity, this book examines representations of manhood during the short-lived vogue for verse satire in the 1590s, by poets like John Donne, John Marston, Everard Guilpin and Joseph Hall. While criticism has often used categorical adjectives like "angry" and "Juvenalian" to describe these satires, this book argues that they engage with early modern ideas of manhood in a conflicted and contradictory way that is frequently at odds with patriarchal norms even when they seem to defend them. The book examines the satires from a series of contexts of masculinity such as husbandry and early modern understandings of age, self-control and violence, and suggests that the images of manhood represented in the satires often exist in tension with early modern standards of manhood. Beyond the specific case studies, while satire has often been assumed to be a "male" genre or mode, this is the first study to engage more in depth with the question of how satire is invested with ideas and practices of masculinity.

Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature

M. Trull
Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature Book PDF

Author : M. Trull
Publisher : Springer
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2013-05-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137282996

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Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature by M. Trull Pdf

This book argues that the early modern public/private boundary was surprisingly dynamic and flexible in early modern literature, drawing upon authors including Shakespeare, Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn, and genres including lyric poetry, drama, prose fiction, and household orders. An epilogue discusses postmodern privacy in digital media.

Economies of Early Modern Drama

Anne Enderwitz
Economies of Early Modern Drama Book PDF

Author : Anne Enderwitz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2023-08-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192692221

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Economies of Early Modern Drama by Anne Enderwitz Pdf

This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments. Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.