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  1. Home
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  3. Miniature and the English Imagination
  • Cited by 7
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2019
Print publication year:
2019
Online ISBN:
9781108649452
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108649452
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
Information

Book description

Focusing on the phenomenon of miniaturization in material culture, literature, and theories of cognition, this study examines the appeal and function of the small-scale during the period from 1650 to 1765. Drawing on three interconnected areas of scholarship, Melinda Alliker Rabb analyzes the human capacity to supplement direct experience of the world through representation, in order to gain knowledge of that world and to attempt control over it. Assessing two kinds of miniature - the real and the imagined - allows rethinking of works by Swift, Pope, Gay, Johnson, Sterne, and others, and shows how the fictional miniature can correspond meaningfully to the world of things. The phenomenon of scaling down objects as various as teapots, bureaus, globes, buckets, spoons, battlefields, and diving bells, has a relationship to large-scale events as various as financial revolution, globalization, scientific discovery, war and other events that challenge old modes of representation and demand new ones.

Reviews

'… the book’s analysis of small things within the broader contexts of the early eighteenth century is invaluable … the book reinforces that although the objects it discusses were physicallysmall, they were rich with meaning, history, and interpretative potential. As such, Rabb’s sophisticated interrogation of the relationship between small things and big ideas will be of great use to anyone doing work on objects (and their representations) which, due to aesthetic hierarchies and cultural regimes of value, have long been deemed not only small, but insignificant.'

Freya Gowrley Source: The Review of English Studies

‘This is a deft, incisive book that produces rich new interpretations of texts, and I recommend it …’

Nicholas Seager Source: MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW

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