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.

Examines the practice and purposes of presenting the small-scale in literature, material culture and theories of cognition.

Presents a collection of stories to help beginning readers and second language learners.

An analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world.

When Dorothy Martin gets a call from her friend Ada Finch, whose gardener son has been arrested for the attempted theft of an antique dolls’ tea set from the Miniatures Museum at the imposing Brocklesby Hall, she doesn’t hesitate to offer her services to clear his name. But when theft leads to murder, Dorothy discovers there are big secrets hidden in the rooms filled with miniatures.