The Little Everyman

 Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature book coverEighteenth-century English literature and culture exhibited a fascination with small male bodies, from Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays to male dwarfs in public exhibitions and bawdy poems featuring diminutive men.

In The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (University of Washington Press), Deborah Needleman Armintor, associate professor of English, traces how the move from court dwarf to a more modern "little man" reflects the shift from aristocracy to a newly bourgeois culture. She highlights classic works from Pope, Fielding, Swift and Sterne, demonstrating how the "little man" became an "everyman" in a century's time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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