The little everyman : stature and masculinity in eighteenth-century English literature / by Deborah Needleman Armintor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Armintor, Deborah Needleman.

Series:

Literary conjugations.

Literary conjugations

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Masculinity in literature.

Stature, Short--Social aspects--England.

Stature, Short.

Short men--England.

Short men.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Seattle : University of Washington Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Eighteenth-century English literature, art, science, and popular culture exhibited an unprecedented fascination with small male bodies of various kinds. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays drew packed crowds, while public exhibitions advertised male dwarfs as paragons of English masculinity. Bawdy popular poems featured diminutive men paired with enormous women, and amateur scientists anthropomorphized and gendered the "minute bodies" they observed under their fashionable new pocket microscopes. Little men, both real and imagined, embodied the anxieties of a newly bourgeois English culture and were transformed to suit changing concerns about the status of English masculinity in the modern era.The Little Everyman explores this strange trend by tracing the historical trajectory of the supplanting of the premodern court dwarf by a more metaphorical and quintessentially modern "little man" who came to represent in miniature the historical shift in literary production from aristocratic patronage to the bourgeois fantasy of freelance authorship. Armintor's close readings of Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne highlight little recognized aspects of classic works while demonstrating how the little man became an "everyman."

Contents:

A visual prehistory

The dwarfing of little-man Pope

The little man: microscope in Brobdingnag

The labor of little men

The little man of feeling

Josef Boruwl Aski's memoirs

Of the celebrated dwarf.

Notes:

"A McLellan Book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9780295801643

0295801646

OCLC:

769187865