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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 64.4 (2003) 501-505



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Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century . By Laura Brown. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001 . xii + 273 pp.

Laura Brown is one of the most productive and influential literary critics today. Over the last two decades she has shaped eighteenth-century studies much as Stephen Greenblatt has shaped Renaissance studies. She has published four books and edited a collection of essays, with Felicity Nussbaum— The New Eighteenth Century (1987)—that hit the field like a giant billiard ball, forever knocking it off one course and onto another. I was deeply inspired by that collection as an undergraduate, but only now, after years as a professor, do I fully understand what a signal accomplishment it was. Nussbaum and Brown took a strongly oppositional stance to the genteel formalism that still held sway in eighteenth-century studies, although by the time they attacked it, it had become a bit dropsical and gouty. Their stroke of genius was to combine the best of what formalism had to offer—close reading [End Page 501] and rhetorical analysis—with energetic Marxist, feminist, and materialist theory to show how poetic rhetoric reflected large-scale ideological formations. 1 In fact, formalism's tools turned out to be uniquely suited to their polemical analysis, since close reading for close reading's sake is deadly boring compared to close reading for political ends. Brown also gave us key words and figures—for instance, the grotesque female body, the fashionable lady with all of her contradictions, the poetic topoi of imperial ambition—for mapping those formations. These ideas swept the field like wildfire, inspiring a whole generation of young scholars to become more feminist. This influence is subtly reflected in the footnotes to Fables of Modernity : many of the books that Brown cites were written in the past ten years by people who came of age after The New Eighteenth Century appeared.

This swerve in a small corner of the academic world is curiously relevant to Brown's argument. Fables of Modernity is about how ideas circulate and become popular. Thus Brown's own success as an entrepreneur of ideas is worth mentioning. Some of her ideas—for instance, about the way Augustan satirists make the grotesque female body into a figure for cultural decay—were suggested by feminist critics like Susan Gubar in the late 1970s. Others were floating around in a vague way. But Brown took them, shaped them, added to them, repackaged them, and gave them her own indelible stamp before sending them out, stronger and more accessible, into a world that happened to be perfectly ready for them. So what makes somebody a successful idea entrepreneur? Genius? Luck? Skill? Being in the right place at the right time? A dogged commitment to pursuing a vision? All of us have ideas. Some are frantic, some dependable, some silly, some competent, some obsessive. Why do some people circulate their ideas so successfully that they push the field as a whole in a new direction, while others watch their ideas grow, ripen, and die without having circulated them at all?

Fables of Modernity identifies five "cultural fables" that spread widely in eighteenth-century Britain because they helped people make sense of the vast economic and political changes associated with modernity. A cultural fable is very much like a story: it has a protagonist, a plot, themes, and narrative structure. It also has its own metaphors, figures, and rhetorical strategies. No single person authors it; a cultural fable is something that grips at the collective imagination, with some writers shaping and others shaped by it. These fables are at once local and highly amorphous. They include the city shower and city sewer; the torrential ocean; Lady Credit; the New World; the Native Prince; and the ape, the monkey, the lapdog, and other nonhuman beings. Each of these fables turns out to be an allegory of the same problem, namely, the way modernity "is circumscribed by alterity—by an imaginative negotiation [End...

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