Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (review)

It has been more than a decade since the publication of the pivotal essay collection edited by Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum, The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987). Yet anyone who has attended a recent meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies or who has logged on to the C18-L listserv could discern rather quickly that the canon wars rage on here. Laura Brown's latest contribution to the field deftly negotiates this battleground by synthesizing the "old" with the "new," further entrenching her position as one of the most respected scholars currently working in eighteenth-century literary studies. In Fables of Modernity, Brown focuses on canonical poetry and the significance of specific literary conventions in a rigorously structuralist mode, while also exploring the production and reception of cultural practices such as petkeeping in a thoroughgoing Marxist-feminist fashion.

Citing indebtedness to a breadth of critics, including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Stephen Greenblatt, Fredric Jameson, and Raymond Williams, Brown grounds her own work firmly in the methodology of cultural studies. Despite the listing of the requisite big boys, Brown's methodology is also definitively feminist in its use of the concept of difference—figured through gender, race, and species—to establish the critical category of the "cultural fable" as "a means of exploring the constitution of modernity in the English eighteenth century" (1). Working with rather than challenging extant definitions of "modernity," Brown defies classifications of the eighteenth century as part of an "early modern" period; this too starkly separates the eighteenth century from its entanglement with modernity, she argues. Indeed, Brown exemplifies and emphasizes the vitality and novelty of the period, insisting that its cultural fables participated directly and dynamically in the construction of modernity. But what exactly is a "cultural fable"? Though Brown never pins down a precise definition, she does offer some analogies and clues to what a cultural fable is not. A cultural fable does not necessarily have a didactic function, nor does it serve as a rigid "system of classification" (2-3). Rather, Brown posits the cultural fable as a flexible analytic tool that links formal literary conventions and print culture to specific historical phenomena. It is more expansive than some tropes, more specific than a cultural movement (such as the cult of sensibility), and similar in many ways to ideology in its impact. At the same time, it adheres to a distinct, formal structure. With its definitive structure and potentially powerful, widespread influence, the slippery cultural fable paradoxically enables Brown to rein in what she sees as the all-too-often diffuse methodology of cultural studies.

Brown achieves the goal of more coherently structuring a cultural studies methodology by invoking a multitude of authoritative textual examples that persuasively build upon and connect to each other. This is particularly true of the first two sections of the book, which concentrate on expansion and exchange by exploring the fables of the city sewer, oceans and torrents, and Lady Credit. Restoration and Augustan poetry reign here, providing Brown's primary locus of interpretation and exemplum of cultural fable. The pressures of urbanization, both literal and imaginative, figure in the image of the city sewer and connect heterogeneity, indiscriminancy, force, and fluidity to the experience of modernity via the female body. In the fable of torrents, nationalism and imperial expansion, evident in the growing shipping and trade industries, take center stage, as does Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). Chapter three defines the fable of that mysterious, changeable, and volatile figure, Lady Credit. Here Brown makes provocative and productive connections between finance—specifically credit culture—the female body, and the emergence of the cult of sensibility through readings of various cultural texts including periodical literature by Defoe and Addison, the discourse of hysteria, Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48...