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    “Is this your buying China?”: Luxury consumerism and superficiality in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife

    Following increased maritime trade and a reliance on foreign goods, the commercial revolution that swept through England in the late sixteenth century resulted in an intensified desire for new and hitherto inaccessible luxury commodities. One such commodity, china porcelain, resulted in a “china fever” that continued well into the eighteenth century, introducing new notions of social refinement and, more importantly, social and economic superficiality. In the infamous “china scene” of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Lady Fidget operates within the discourse of “woman as consumer” in order to forward her sexual agency, participating in the surface play that luxury commodities as ultimately empty signifiers afford. England’s commercial revolution not only saw…