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Miniaturization in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

1969; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/utq.38.2.159

1712-5278

Philip Stevick,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

A good many of the prominent tropes of the eighteenth century have a significant relation with physical size. In the great chain of being, for example, gradations are often pictured as extending from smaller to larger. In the imagery of deistic teleology the perception of aptness of physical proportion and appropriateness of size are key routes to the necessary conclusions. In the interplay between urban and rural affinities so frequent in the literature of the period, shock at the city, pleasure in its diversity, frustration at the limitation of the village, or the imaginative reconstruction of the village's communal integrity — all of these involve an explicit concern with size. In a different direction, ideas of the state of nature and the human community take their concrete shape by means of images precisely adjusted in their scale: man alone, the leader and the led, a dozen wits at Will's Coffee House, the audience at Tyburn, "the mob." The Newtonian delights in the literature of the period express themselves in images of cosmic regularity and microscopic intricacy. As the architecture of the eighteenth century enters literature, it tends to picture either Palladian grandeur or "the humble cot." Even in the tendency of the literature to speak of itself, the physical size of its printed format is significant. Joseph Andrews' two volumes duodecimo are "these little volumes." And the Duke of Gloucester, as everybody knows, found Gibbon's Decline and Fall to be "Another damned thick, square book."