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Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature ed. by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin (review)
Ist Teil von
Eighteenth - Century Studies, 2024, Vol.57 (3), p.395
Ort / Verlag
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2024
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Project MUSE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
The joineriana the editors have fashioned (which includes work from art historians, literary scholars, curators, and historians) offers multiple points of connection and shared meaning that resonate across the collection, a few of which I trace across the rest of this review. Unsurprisingly, many chapters dwell on questions of scale, such as Abigail Williams’s exploration of how miniature books used their size to grapple with problems of knowledge, offering their readers the promise of access to vast fields of information (such as national histories or biblical doctrine) by making them “possessable” through the tiny text’s material form (25). Chico’s attention to the way small things are implicated in global intimacies of power and and exploitation is echoed in many of the volume’s other contributions, such as Serena Dyer’s consideration of how accessory objects featuring Brittania’s image “generated a bodily intimacy between the British people and the national figurehead” (245), Patricia F. Ferguson’s discussion of how seal trinkets decorated with racist caricatures let their users “touch and hold” a fantasy of colonial mastery (203), and Pauline Rushton’s analysis of how the leather letter cases used by British merchants are entangled with the slave trade’s violence.