About

Melinda Rabb is a Professor of English whose research interests encompass the literature and culture of the 'long' eighteenth century, spanning from the English Civil Wars through the era of Jane Austen. Her scholarly work explores themes such as satire, secret history, the novel, early modern women's writing, the idea of war, trauma, embodiment, material culture, and the history of cognition. She has authored significant books including 'Satire and Secrecy in English Literature 1650-1750' and 'Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture 1650-1765,' which analyze the practice of miniaturization in literature, art, science, and cognitive science, and investigate how small-scale objects and texts influence eighteenth-century cultural and intellectual history. Rabb's research also investigates the impact of the English Civil Wars on eighteenth-century literature, particularly how war trauma and internecine conflict shape representations of masculine identity, the body, and political institutions. Her recent work engages with embodiment, masculinity, and the relationship between war trauma and literature, drawing on new research in these areas. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Eli Lilley Foundation, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, and the Winterthur Museum, and has delivered invited lectures internationally. Before her tenure at Brown, she taught in the Humanities department at MIT, and her scholarly contributions include numerous publications, edited volumes, and participation in academic conferences.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• History
• Art
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Visual arts
• Engineering
• Philosophy
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• A Voyage to Lilliput

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  A Voyage to Lilliput lays the ground for a number of satirical techniques that continue throughout Gulliver’s Travels: selective use of detail; topical allusions to real people and events; an unreliable narrator; competing claims of the abstract (language, human ideals) and the concrete (the human body, the physical world); reversals; and manipulation of size and perspective. Lilliput, where everything shrinks by a scale of 12 to 1, has proven to be the most beguiling fantasy among the satiric fictions in Gulliver’s Travels that ultimately entrap Swift’s readers in painful truths. This chapter discusses the narrative style that readers encounter at the start of Gulliver’s Travels; the political parallels between Lilliput and England; the play on perspective and expectations; and Swift’s interest in the volatility, manipulability, and power of language.

  PublisherDOI

• British Women Satirists in the Long Eighteenth Century

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 5 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  This collection of innovative essays by leading scholars on eighteenth-century British women satirists showcases women's contributions to the satiric tradition and challenges the assumption that women were largely targets, rather than practitioners, of satire during the long eighteenth century. The essays examine women's satires across diverse genres, from the fable to the periodical, and attend to women writers' appropriation of a literary style and form often viewed as exclusively masculine. The introduction features a new theory of women's satire and proposes a framework for analyzing satiric techniques employed by women writers. Organized chronologically, the contributors' essays address a wide range of authors and explore the ways in which satiric writings by women engaged in contemporary cultural conversations, influencing assumptions about gender, sociability, politics, and literary practices. This inclusive yet tightly-focused collection formulates an innovative and provocative new feminist theory of satire.

  DOI

• Unlocking the Dressing Room

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-03-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris: Or, the Ladies Dressing Room Unlock’d, and her Toilette Spread was written before 1685 and published anonymously in 1690. The poem, accompanied by a preface and a dictionary of “hard and foreign names, and Terms of the Art Cosmetick,” aroused enough interest to require a second issue and a second edition within a year, followed by yet another edition in 1700. Significant textual evidence supports the claim that later male satirists borrowed without acknowledgement from her work. Further, significant evidence from the Evelyn family papers supports the claim that the teenage author, eulogized by her father John Evelyn as exceptional in her piety, demurred from his angelic portrayal. Her published poem about an imaginary dressing room, in combination with unpublished documents found in her actual dressing room, and in contrast to male-authored works that borrowed from her, establishes a perspective on her single but significant contribution to the history of women and satire. Mundus Muliebris ridicules the marriage marketplace and its effects on women’s bodies and minds. Exposed to a prospective husband, the dressing room’s lavish space documents women’s involvement in that marketplace, in all its glittering, dehumanizing, disturbing, and at times disgusting detail.

  PublisherDOI

• War

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-10-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The concept of the evils of war weaves through Johnson’s work like a connective thread that at times appears visibly on the surface and at other times more subtly underlies the fabric of his thinking and expression. If the idea of war is pervasive, however, the actual body of the warrior is rare. Johnson avoided representation of the embattled flesh and bone of those who did the fighting and suffered its consequences. This dichotomy—confront the idea of war but avoid war-torn bodies—is central to recognizing the effect in his work of postmemory, the phenomenon through which trauma can be displaced onto later generations and can be reimagined by those who are distanced from immediate disaster by history or geography. This chapter analyzes the ways in which Johnson’s transformative abstractions of the corporeal human form are situated within narratives of human-generated violence whose pains resist direct confrontation.

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword:

  2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Swift, Secret History, and War

  Eighteenth-Century Life · 2020-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  “Swift, Secret History, and War” argues that the relationship between Swift’s writing, reading, and his abiding interest in the English Civil Wars produced a distinctive contribution to the discourses that arose after the reestablishment of monarchy, called “secret histories.” These narratives claim to expose clandestine acts, to pull away veils that hide petty motives, and to expose abuses underlying the exercise of power. In Swift’s work, however, the impulse to dig up embarrassing or disillusioning secrets serves yet another purpose; it allows more painful realities to remain buried and thus provides a means of displacing, postponing, and avoiding direct confrontation with the devastation caused by war. The following discussion identifies and analyzes some of the ways in which traumatic conflict—especially within a nation in which neighbor has fought neighbor—requires indirection, delayed response, and the transference of the burden of representation onto succeeding generations. Literature can play a crucial role in the process of displacement when human history has proven (as Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master observes) “capable of such Enormities, . . . worse than Brutality itself.” Swift’s distinctive deployment of secret history’s strategies allows an ironic historian a mechanism to look directly at and disclose some of the follies and vices of his culture, but also to remain cognizant, at some level, of what remains buried under “the heap” of a traumatic past.

  PublisherDOI

• Swift, Defoe, Civil War, and the Meaning of (Bare) Life

  2019-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The English Civil Wars had profound effects on eighteenth-century literature, yet the manifestations of those effects often are indirect. This essay argues that works by Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe displace the trauma of that internal conflict – a conflict that destroyed bodies and beliefs – onto fictions that at first appear not to be about war. Readings of texts including Gulliver’s Travels, The Drapier’s Letters, The Journal of the Plague Year, and Robinson Crusoe are framed by first-hand accounts of military experiences during the Wars, such as preparing, fighting, and surviving battle or siege, and by concepts such as sovereignty, the state of exception, and bare life. Civil war raised fundamental questions about the value of life, epitomized in the practice of granting no quarter. Both Swift and Defoe find ways to examine the political and moral dilemma of who is empowered to decide if a life is worth living.

  PublisherDOI

• Miniature and the English Imagination: Literature, Cognition, and Small-Scale Culture, 1650–1765

  2019-02-14 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Coda

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Science and Miniature</i>: animal rationis capax<i>and</i>homo depictor

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-02-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Catherine Ingrassia

  4 shared

• Amanda Hiner

  Winthrop University

  3 shared

• James Woolley

  Texas A&M University

  2 shared

• Marcus Walsh

  2 shared

• Andrew Carpenter

  Royal Irish Academy

  2 shared

• David Hayton

  2 shared

• Stephen Karian

  2 shared

• Gregory Lynall

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., English

  Brown University

• B.A., English

  Brown University

Awards & honors

• Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellowship, Brown University, 1982…
• Pembroke Center Faculty Fellowship, Brown University, 1983-8…
• Bronson Fellowship, Brown University, 1984-85
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Univers…
• Winterthur Fellowship, 2012