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17 results

  • Chapter 10 - A Voyage to Lilliput

  • from Part III - Reading Gulliver’s Travels
  • Edited by Daniel Cook, University of Dundee, Nicholas Seager, Keele University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to <i>Gulliver's Travels</i>
    Published online:
    05 October 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023, pp 125-136

  • Summary

    A Voyage to Lilliput lays the ground for a number of satirical techniques that continue throughout Gulliver’s Travels: selective use of detail; topical allusions to real people and events; an unreliable narrator; competing claims of the abstract (language, human ideals) and the concrete (the human body, the physical world); reversals; and manipulation of size and perspective. Lilliput, where everything shrinks by a scale of 12 to 1, has proven to be the most beguiling fantasy among the satiric fictions in Gulliver’s Travels that ultimately entrap Swift’s readers in painful truths. This chapter discusses the narrative style that readers encounter at the start of Gulliver’s Travels; the political parallels between Lilliput and England; the play on perspective and expectations; and Swift’s interest in the volatility, manipulability, and power of language.

  • Chapter 2 - Unlocking the Dressing Room

  • from Part I - Traditions and Breaks
  • Edited by Amanda Hiner, Elizabeth Tasker Davis
  • Book:
    British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century
    Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022, pp 45-64

  • Summary

    Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris: Or, the Ladies Dressing Room Unlock’d, and her Toilette Spread was written before 1685 and published anonymously in 1690. The poem, accompanied by a preface and a dictionary of “hard and foreign names, and Terms of the Art Cosmetick,” aroused enough interest to require a second issue and a second edition within a year, followed by yet another edition in 1700. Significant textual evidence supports the claim that later male satirists borrowed without acknowledgement from her work. Further, significant evidence from the Evelyn family papers supports the claim that the teenage author, eulogized by her father John Evelyn as exceptional in her piety, demurred from his angelic portrayal. Her published poem about an imaginary dressing room, in combination with unpublished documents found in her actual dressing room, and in contrast to male-authored works that borrowed from her, establishes a perspective on her single but significant contribution to the history of women and satire. Mundus Muliebris ridicules the marriage marketplace and its effects on women’s bodies and minds. Exposed to a prospective husband, the dressing room’s lavish space documents women’s involvement in that marketplace, in all its glittering, dehumanizing, disturbing, and at times disgusting detail.

Miniature and the English Imagination
  • Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650–1765
  • Melinda Alliker Rabb
  • Published online:
    08 February 2019
    Print publication:
    14 February 2019
  • 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.