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Miniature and the English Imagination

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Miniature and the English Imagination Synopsis

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.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9781108425834
Publication date: 14th February 2019
Author: Melinda Alliker (Brown University, Rhode Island) Rabb
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 250 pages
Genres: Material culture
Literary studies: general