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
