Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature. By JOSHUA SCODEL. (Literature in History) Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2002. viii+ 367 pp. 37.95 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-691-09028-9.

In this rich, precise monograph, Joshua Scodel charts the complex and diverse ways in which early modern writers responded to and developed ideas of means and of extremes. The book begins with considerations of the contrasting ways in which John Donne and Francis Bacon revised the notion of the middle way. Through close readings of Donne's 'Satire 3' and the verse epistle to Sir Henry Wotton ('Sir, more than kisses'), Scodel argues that Donne's poetry advocates neither total acceptance nor total rejection of any of the rival Christian denominations and, more generally, of forces of authority, but...

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