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

Fables of Modernity is a wonderful book. In it, Laura Brown returns to the scene of structuralism and demonstrates that our concern with narrative-as a way of making sense of cultural antinomies-was too soom displaced by a brand of poststructuralism that made all such signifying systems melt into air. She homes in on three cultural fables that mark modernity's emergence in the early eigthteenth century. Working deftly across an extensive field of letters that includes both Augustan poetry and sentimental fiction, she shows how these texts not only talk to one another but also make sense each in its own right as they draw on these fables to do so. Fables of Modernity both rewards the reader many times over with exciting new readings of Clarissa, The Dunclad, and Sir Charles Grandison and demonstrates a new way of reading historically.

Fables of Modernity assumes that the eighteenth century was indeed England's first 'modern' century and it proceeds to explore the ramifications of that modernity in the literary culture of the period.

In constructing two forms of 'other,' the woman and the non-European, Brown argues that eighteenth-century England turned to material culture for metaphors to represent the modern: the city sewer which emblematizes the metropolis in Swift's 'Description of a City Shower': the torrents and oceans that represent fate in texts such as Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes and in works by Dryden, Pope, and others; finance and the fable of Lady Credit; capitalism; the native prince; and pets that symbolize the nonhuman being. These marginally literary texts document the invention of cultural myths of modernity, which are the triumph of capitalism, urbanization, commercialization, and the historical differentiation of today from yesterday.

In essence, Brown's cultural fables are rich metaphorical themes rooted in significant social and historical processes.... Brown's last chapter, on the relationship between the animal and the human, is particularly fascinating, especially her account of the growing popularity of pets during the rise of England's bourgeois commercial society.

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.

Laura Brown's Fables of Modernity is a richly satisfying study of the cultural fables of early modernity in 18th-century English culture. Authoritative and commanding in its scholarship, a synthesis of the best work in recent cultural studies, Brown's book is powerful and original, consistently stimulating and provocative.

On urgent topics that include urban infrastructure, global financial markets, intercultural contact and exchange, and the boundaries of the human and nonhuman, Laura Brown's excellent Fables of Modernity makes a crucial point about the eighteenth century that scholars have long suspected but until now have left relatively unexplored-it isn't over yet.