Laura Brown

Ends of empire : women and ideology in early eighteenth-century English literature

In this bold and provocative book, Laura Brown explores the representation of women in English literature from the Restoration to the fall of Walpole--a time during which an expansionist economic system was consolidated, a fertile ideology advocating a benevolent and progressive imperialism took root, and the slave trade was institutionalized. In this period, she maintains, the image of the female not only played a leading role in literary culture but also profoundly affected mercantile capitalist ideology.

The Lady, the Lapdog, and Literary Alterity

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.

The Ideology of Restoration Poetic Form: John Dryden

Although intellectual historians have rejected the notion that Dryden was a skeptic, recent readings of his specific works have increasingly emphasized irony and absurdity. This critical contradict...

The Happy Man and the Cultural Fable of the Good Life

The Good Life, a cultural fable prominent in the imaginative artifacts of the post-war period, is fundamentally linked to material culture as an imaginative reflection upon or negotiation with contemporary historical forces. The material phenomenon condensed this fantasy of happiness is the economic expansion of the immediately postwar period. The Good Life registers and shapes the experience of prosperity, comfort, and individual material gratification. The formulation of this paradigm of bourgeois social success could be said to originate in the English eighteenth century, through the projection of certain assertions, models, images, and claims on the imagination from the past into the future. We can support an understanding and critique of The Good Life as it appears today, through an attention to the early phases of its development in the eighteenth-century poetic trope of the Happy Man. The fantasy of the Happy Man provides a first-stage version of the cultural fable of The Good Life, and this early mode of modern happiness-invention can help us understand the nature of its imaginative power, and can support our critique of the ideology behind this cultural fable going forward to our own present and future. This essay suggests that this very local but influential eighteenth-century figure structures an ongoing imaginative experience that tends to coalesce around ideologies of bourgeois prosperity, then and now.