ABSTRACT
The great plague of London in 1665 is an exemplary setting in which to consider how the Enlightenment came to script both space and time. Experience of trauma and the anticipation of a return to that traumatic experience could galvanize agents of change into strategic problem-solving—or so the Enlightenment register suggests. Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, no one understood better this notion of a continuum from the health of the body to the health and well-being of the body politic than Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s urban space reflects very tendentiously modernity’s unwitting investment in the fluidity of time-space. Enlightenment British culture is replete with examples— some in the fiction and nonfiction and others which are immanent throughout the public culture— of power manifesting itself in theatrical ways, in public space. The harnessing of knowledge, the division of disciplines, the categorization of subjects, and the ordering of objects are all part of the Enlightenment project.
