Miniature and the English Imagination
Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650–1765

Examines the practice and purposes of presenting the small-scale in literature, material culture and theories of cognition.

Melinda Alliker Rabb (Author)

9781108425834, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 February 2019

250 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.55 kg

'This is a deft, incisive book that produces rich new interpretations of texts, and I recommend it …' Nicholas Seager, MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW

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.

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
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Material culture [JFCD], Literature & literary studies [D]