Excess and the mean in early modern English literature

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