![]() | The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature Subjects: English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Masculinity in literature; Stature Short -- Social aspects -- England; Short men -- England; Eighteenth-century English literature, art, science, and popular culture exhibited an unprecedented fascination with small male bodies of various kinds. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays drew packed crowds, while public exhibitions advertised male dwarfs as paragons of English masculinity. Bawdy popular poems featured diminutive men paired with enormous women, and amateur scientists anthropomorphized and gendered the "minute bodies" they observed under their fashionable new pocket microscopes. Little men, both real and imagined, embodied the anxieties of a newly bourgeois English culture and were transformed to suit changing concerns about the status of English masculinity in the modern era. 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 . |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)