From the publication of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" in
1726 to Josef Boruwlaski's "Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf" in
1788, 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, while 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 pre-modern court dwarf's supplanting
in the 1700s 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 astute close
readings of Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne highlight little
recognized aspects of some of the classic works and writers of the
period while demonstrating how, over the course of a single
century, the little man became an "everyman." Intervening in
current cross-disciplinary discussions of literature and art, the
history of science, extraordinary bodies and disability, and
eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies, Armintor makes a
major contribution to our understanding of how questions of
masculinity and gender, the sociology of marriage, and the
economics of commodity capitalism converge in central literary
works of the English eighteenth century.
Deborah Needleman Armintor is associate professor of English at
the University of North Texas and the co-editor of
"Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Vol. 2."
"Armintor mounts an historical argument that dwarfs move from
serving as representatives of aristocratic court culture to models
of the bourgeois man of feeling that was so prominent in the
culture of the end of the century. In the process, she teases out
the rich and ambiguous reciprocity between morality and
physicality, between power and febrility, between the big and the
small, between sexuality and mentality." -Barbara Benedict, Trinity
College
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