Miniature and the English Imagination
Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650–1765
£30.99
- Author: Melinda Alliker Rabb, Brown University, Rhode Island
- Date Published: March 2021
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781108444286
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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.
Read more- Demonstrates a new relationship between literature and the material world where there was a simultaneous production of miniature objects in fiction and reality
- Provides new insights on the relationship between literary and cognitive theory studies
- Examines the miniature in the literary work of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and Daniel Defoe amongst others
Reviews & endorsements
'… 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 physically small, 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, The Review of English Studies
See more reviews'This is a deft, incisive book that produces rich new interpretations of texts, and I recommend it …' Nicholas Seager, MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
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×Product details
- Date Published: March 2021
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781108444286
- length: 253 pages
- dimensions: 230 x 150 x 15 mm
- weight: 0.38kg
- contains: 12 b/w illus.
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
1. Introduction to an age of small-scale
2. Swift and miniature: Cogito ergo Gulliver
3. Lilliput recalibrated: Johnson and others
4. Toying with thought: Pope, Gay, Dodsley
5. War in miniature: models, maps, medals, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy
6. Science and miniature: animal rationis capax and homo depictor
Coda: 'the last extreme of littleness': miniature and the postmodern imagination
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