Define microcosm in literature
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(4) Scale itself, I suggest, gets politicized at Marvell's Nun Appleton, where the spatial logic that underwrites national expansion is transmuted into the techniques of poetic figuration. In foregrounding the poem's multidimensionality, I hope to show how a long-recognized feature of the poem, its virtuosic manipulation of space, conveys particular political meanings that have received less attention. The poem's microcosmic strategy is an attempted solution to this conundrum, allowing Marvell to depict Fairfax's house as at once its own self-contained 'world' and a necessary node in the global networks of Cromwell's new England, a nation of purified Protestantism and imperial promise. (3) He had, in other words, to depict the virtue of political withdrawal without unduly slighting the virtue of expansive political and military activity. (2) To safeguard his political future in the new Protectorate, Marvell had to avoid ruffling the feathers of both Fairfax, who had recently decided to resign his military post and retire to his ancestral estates at Nun Appleton, and Oliver Cromwell, who wanted the general to extend the civil wars into Scotland. This essay argues that Marvell's poem attempts to take advantage of such utility by depicting the estates at Nun Appleton as a microcosm of larger, even global, spatial expanses, and that this dimensional reframing shapes its depicted contest between retirement and civic engagement. More profoundly, Norgate's techniques instruct Marvell in a method of expressing that sensibility by writing in miniature, condensing geography onto a page.Īs Norgate's career demonstrates, the ability to draw in miniature could be imperially useful. Gage's descriptions of Mexican feather paintings, appealing to the poet's strikingly visual and spatially acute sensibility, are acknowledged in the poem's glancing reference to a 'Mexique painting' (580). (1) To move from historical to literary speculation: both books leave their mark on that topography-in-verse. The former book is dedicated to Fairfax himself the latter to his daughter Mary, whom Marvell tutors from 1650 to 1652, writing, at some point during that period, his country-house poem 'Upon Appleton House'.
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1648), is a study of 'the art of limning' in miniscule dimensions, divided into considerations of pictures 'by the Life, Landskip, and History' and written by an erstwhile cartographer who once mapped Bermuda to aid England's imperial venture there. The other, Edward Norgate's Miniatura (1628, rev. One, Thomas Gage's The English-American his Travail by Sea and Land (1648), recounts the author's journeys across the Spanish territories in what will become Mexico and Central America. He comes across two books that propel his imagination from his patron's Yorkshire estate to distant lands across the Atlantic, the nurseries of England's fledgling empire. To begin with a micro-episode of fictional history: Andrew Marvell peruses Thomas Fairfax's library at Nun Appleton.