Title Miniature and the English imagination : literature, cognition, and small-scale culture 1650-1765 / Melinda Alliker Rabb, Brown University

Published Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2019 ©2019

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 243 pages) : illustrations Contents Cover; Half-title; Title page; Copyright information; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 Introduction to an Age of Small-Scale; Material Culture: Preliminary Evidence; The Englishness of English Miniature; Miniature in Theory; Miniaturization in Literature; Historicizing Theory; Notes; Chapter 2 Swift and Miniature: Cogito ergo Gulliver; The Material Context; Thinking Things Through/Thinking Through Things; The Furniture of Gulliver's Mind; Notes; Chapter 3 Lilliput Recalibrated: Johnson and Others; Lilliput redux; Johnson and Lilliput; Size, Representation, and Cognition Is the Small-Scale ''Easy''?Notes; Chapter 4 Toying with Thought: Pope, Gay, Dodsley; Material Context: ''Nicknackatories''; Toys, Trade Cards, and Symbolic Representation; Pope's The Rape of the Lock; Dodsley's The Toy Shop; The restless toy: John Gay's The Fan; Toying with Disaster; Notes; Chapter 5 War in Miniature: Models, Maps, Medals, and Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Preliminary Material Evidence; Sterne and the Object(s) of War; Seven Years of War in Two Inches; Medals and Non-Linear Perspective; Si vis pacem, para bellum?; Notes Chapter 6 Science and Miniature: animal rationis capax and homo depictorThe New Science and Miniature; Theory and the ''Quintessentially Human''; Toyshop/Battlefield/Laboratory; Seeing the Whole at Once: ''th'Almighty's Model''; Scales of Good and Evil; An American Adventure of Representing and Intervening; Notes; Coda: ''the last extreme of littleness'': Miniature and the Postmodern Imagination; Notes; Bibliography; Index Summary 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject English literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism Miniature objects -- In literature Material culture in literature. Literature and society -- England -- History -- 17th century Literature and society -- England -- History -- 18th century English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Miniature objects in literature English literature Literature and society Material culture in literature England Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781108643092 1108643094 9781108649452 1108649459

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