THEORY & PRACTICE IN ENGLISH STUDIES, VOL. VI, ISSUE 1, 2013 IMAGE AND DISCOURSE: THE RHETORIC OF VIRTUE AND VICE IN EARLY 18 th CENTURY ENGLAND Dita Hochmanová THE contrast between virtue and vice has always been shaping our perception of what is right and wrong as well as our dis- tinction between those who resemble us and those who differ. The potential of this contrast to create an image and affect power relationships between groups and individuals did not remain disregarded in eighteenth-century England. Focusing on the use of concepts of virtue and vice in the political and literary discourses in the first half of the century, the article analyses the ways in which figurative language highlighted the differences between the classes and various social groups. To demonstrate the effects of the rhetoric of virtue and vice, the related tropes of patriotism, greed, and luxury are examined as examples of valuable arms against political as well as personal enemies in the eighteenth-century paper war. Exploited mainly by the English gentry and aristocracy, the trope of patriotism served to differentiate various political fac- tions and undermine the authority of the opponents. Similarly, the motif of greed was employed to emphasise the gap between the social classes in order to suppress the increasing powers of the dangerously rising moneyed commoners. Finally, after the Third Earl of Shaftesbury presented luxury as the symbol of moral decay which results from foreign trade, the trope was used by the upper classes to proclaim the illegitimacy of the new emerging wealthy businessmen to political influence. Since the article is furthermore concerned with the reflection of these rhetoric strategies in social satire, namely in the works of Jona- than Swift and Henry Fielding, it also aims to reveal the close interconnectedness of the literary and political discourses at that time and shows that the tropes moved from one discourse to the other in order to serve as means of ideological support and social criticism.