Miniature and the English Imagination

Melinda Alliker Rabb is Professor of English at Brown University, Rhode Island. She is author of Satire and Secrecy in English Literature From 1650-1750 (2007), as well as articles and chapters on a wide range of eighteenth-century topics and writers.

• 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.

'… 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