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The Lady, the Lapdog, and Literary Alterity
- The Eighteenth Century
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2011
- pp. 31-45
- 10.1353/ecy.2011.0001
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay argues that the image of the lady and the lapdog, whose provenance can be traced to the representation of female petkeeping in the eighteenth century, can be linked to other fantasies of alterity. This image provides a formal model for the contemporary understanding of the encounter with difference, and reveals the ways in which an expansionist culture imagined a relationship with an absolutely alien other.