Miniature and the English Imagination

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.