Abstract
Abstract: This essay explores how Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27) fashions a concept of the historical present out of the island's geomorphology, and especially the ongoing history of coastal erosion. Notably, Defoe's sense of islandness partakes of the world-ruination found in Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), save that Defoe sees a "kind of divinity" in global trade, and the deep time of capital that can explain—if not mend—a broken planet. The result is an elongated and catastrophic present that yokes together anthropocentric forces with theological geologies to capture life amidst its wreckage.
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