ON LONGING - book about narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, and the collection

Aug 7, 2026

An analysis of longing as a narrative structure that invents and distances its objects, tying exaggeration, scale, and significance to the relation between language and experience. The work traces how description and narrative forms connect ideology to the creation of what is meant, especially through metaphors such as inside/outside, history/stasis, and partiality/transcendence. Chapters examine the miniature, the gigantic, and the imaginary body, then develop objects of desire through the souvenir and the collection, culminating in a study of nostalgia, origin, and symbolic generation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages230

Reading Time5 h 54 min

AccessFree to download

Preface/Hyperbole

Prologue

On Description and the Book

Still Life

The Sadness Without an Object

Interior Decorations

Space of Language

The Miniature

Micrographia

Tableau: The Miniature Described

The Secret Life of Things

The Dollhouse

Miniature Time

The Gigantic

Skywriting: Exteriority and Nature

Exteriority: The City

The Gigantic Described

The Lie: Gigantism in Language

The Imaginary Body

The Grotesque Body

The Body Made Miniature

The Tom Thumb Wedding

Reading the Body

Objects of Desire

Part I. The Souvenir

Part II. The Collection

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

# ON LONGING Narratives of the Miniature,the Gigantic,the Souvenir,the Collection Susan Stewart Tenth printing in paperback,2007◎I993 Duke University PressAllrights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞Typeset in Palatino Originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press in I984.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appearon the last printed page of this book. For my mother and grandmothers—Delores Stewart,Alice Stewart,and Nellie Brown # TABLE OF CONTENTS ## Preface/Hyperbole ixPrologue 1 1.ON DESCRIPTION AND THE BOOK 3 Still Life 3 The Sadness Without an Object 14Interior Decorations 24Space of Language 31 ## 2.THE MINIATURE 37 Micrographia 37 Tableau:The Miniature Described 44The Secret Life of Things 54The Dollhouse 61Miniature Time 65 ## 3.THE GIGANTIC 70 Skywriting:Exteriority and Nature 70Exteriority:The City 78The Gigantic Described 86The Lie:Gigantism in Language 93 ## 4.THE IMAGINARY BODY 104 The Grotesque Body 104The Body Made Miniature 111 The Tom Thumb Wedding 117Reading the Body 125 5.OBJECTS OF DESIRE 132 Part I.The Souvenir 132The Selfish 132 Distance and Intimacy 139Separation and Restoration 145 Part II.The Collection,Paradise of Consumption 151Context Destroyed 151Inside and Outside 154Metaconsumption:The Female Impersonator 166 Conclusion/Litotes 171Notes 174 Selected Bibliography 193Index 205 ## PREFACE/HYPERBOLE his essay centers on certain metaphorsthat arise whenever we talk about the rela-tion of language to experience or,morespecifically,whenever we talk about therelation of narrative to its objects.Thesemetaphors—history and stasis,inside andoutside,partiality and transcendence—form the focus of the discussion in thiswork as I ask:How can we describe some-thing?What relation does description bearto ideology and the very invention ofthat 'something'?and,analogously,What does exaggeration,as a mode of signification,exaggerate?Narrativeis seen in this essay as a structure of desire,a structure that bothinvents and distances its object and thereby inscribes again and againthe gap between signifier and signified that is the place of generationfor the symbolic.Therefore my reader will discover that I am particu-larly interested in the social disease of nostalgia as I examine therelations of narrative to origin and object,and that herein lies thereason I have chosen a kind of ache as my title.For the word longinghas a number of meanings which,taken together,in fact encompassthis study of narrative,exaggeration,scale,and significance:yearningdesire,the fanciful cravings incident to women during pregnancy,belongings or appurtenances. If we look to the first meaning of longing,"yearning desire,"we seethat,according to the list of examples in the OED,it experiences asplit in the eighteenth century.In 1713(Addison)we find:“Whencethis pleasing hope,this fond desire,this longing after immortality?" And in 1748(Anson's Voyage):“Our native country,for which many ofus by this time began to have great longings."My point is not to notethe death of immortality,but rather to note that the location of desire,or,more particularly,the direction of force in the desiring narrative,is always a future-past,a deferment of experience in the direction oforigin and thus eschaton,the point where narrative begins/ends,both engendering and transcending the relation between materialityand meaning.Yet the particular content of this desire is subject tohistorical formation.A hundred and twenty-seven years before An-son's Voyage,Burton wrote:“'Tis a childish humour to hone afterhome,to be discontent at that which others seek;to prefer,as baseIcelanders and Norwegians do,their own ragged island before Italyor Greece,the gardens of the world....All places are distant fromheaven alike,the sun shines haply as warm in one city as in another,and to a wise man there is no difference of climes;friends are every-where to him that behaves himself

FAQs

How does the book define “longing” within narrative?

Longing functions as a structure of desire: it invents and distances the object, reinforcing the gap between signifier and signified where symbolic meaning is generated.

What is the connection between the miniature and the relation of language to experience?

The miniature is treated as a narrative scale that organizes description, turning smallness into a way of thinking about objects, imagination, and the social meanings produced through language.

How do “the souvenir” and “the collection” relate to desire and nostalgia?

The souvenir organizes separation and restoration, while the collection reframes consumption as context-destroying metaconsumption, together exposing nostalgia’s social “disease” and the narrative drive toward origin.

Aug 7, 2026

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