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In this interdisciplinary essay, I combine a literary and cultural-studies approach to the study of the relationship between road-making and literature. The enclosure of lands and the construction of turnpikes and canals not only broadened opportunities for travel and navigation but also accelerated the dissemination of commodities of all sorts. These geographical developments expanded familiar notions of place that were framed by the traditional units of parish, estate or even metropolis. Turning to Foucauldian and economic views of the implications of the turnpikes, I argue that the turnpike road system made geography fragmented but simultaneously reshaped fragmented geography into a more organized network of improved roads. Highlighting the impact of the spread of turnpikes and canals in the early eighteenth century material conditions of writing, I aim to contribute to the productive field of the intersection of geography and literature. Through the telling phrase, “the great thoroughfare of the Brain,” Daniel Defoe establishes a sense of place that locates authors within specific circuits of information, particularly within the turnpike road system as the medium and outcome, the precondition and embodiment, of the modern production of space. Crusoe’s voyage beyond the island of Juan Fernandez enfolds a return to the present Britain to reconfigure Defoe’s sense of the cultural geographies of novel writing.
