Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700

When Laura Rosenthal and I first discussed this project, I didn’t realize how deeply the form and reality of the pandemic would seep into everything we did. For one thing, it was a collective effort undertaken in what everyone has been calling, “COVID time” (to distinguish it from “the before times”). This makes it harder to say precisely when it began. But from my recollection the impetus really came from the March 2020 lockdowns that left many of us isolated and teaching from home. In conversations with my friends in eighteenth-century studies, I learned that many had been revisiting an odd yet familiar text—Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. This is a work that is not quite a novel, not quite a history, yet a stubbornly unintegrated compound of the two. Something about this moment had turned this mute geologic specimen into an indispensable book.

For those familiar with the Journal, it was difficult to understand or explain the pandemic without retelling its scenes of fear, flight, or horror. Those conversations on social media moved to a Facebook Group and Zoom discussion managed by Celia Barnes and Joe Drury, with many others participating in our impromptu, online scholarly community. From there our discussions quickly entered into my teaching, as they did for many others, and thus many of us made room for this curious little plague book. Then Laura Rosenthal offered us this forum for more extensive reflections, with some room for discussion of how our teaching and classes had been affected by the pandemic.

In this way Defoe’s text, because of its unexpected importance in our pandemic pedagogy and curricula, helped shape and participate in what Aleida Assmann has called the “functional memory” of a very specific moment. “From a particular present,” Assmann writes, “a section of the past is illuminated in such a way that it opens a future horizon. Whatever memory is thus constructed is always profiled by the edges of forgetfulness.”¹ [End Page 3] In this mode of cultural memory, the forces of “active forgetfulness” and temporal compression ensure that once firm boundaries between past, present, and future begin to weaken and de-couple, while the formerly regular, successive advancement of time stutters and stalls and loops.

But if “COVID time” has taught us anything, it is to recognize the strange dilations and uncertainties of felt time, the difficulty of demarcating a specific “period,” or of knowing when we’ve exited a particular moment. By this point we’ve repeatedly confessed to our families and friends how difficult COVID has made marking the passage of time, or sensing one’s location in it. This is almost certainly connected with the pandemic’s disruption of our usual public narratives of uniformly advancing time. Hence, our governments and employers keep repeating that we’re “moving ahead” or “returning to normal” or “putting this behind us,” despite the evidence to the contrary.

This special issue was conceived in the Spring of 2020, when the essays were largely proposed; they were first written as we “emerged from the pandemic,” only to find ourselves fully back into it when COVID mutated into new “variants of concern.” That was the moment when newspaper dashboards charted new waves of infection, hospitalization, and death each week, serving as the modern counterpart to the Restoration era’s “Lord Have Mercy” broadsides announcing burial numbers.² Then the radical pedagogies of Spring 2020 instruction, designed to repair or at least address the global, generational damage wrought by the pandemic, were optimistically revised for “hybrid” and “blended” classrooms the following autumn. Those too, however, collapsed into virtual mode as yet another round of lockdowns sent everyone back to isolation. Then while the essays were being revised and expanded, the cycle of pandemic/post-pandemic/pandemic continued and continues to this moment of writing (January 2022), defying our own attempts to tie it off. And judging by the North American and UK locations of the writers represented here, (Houston, Bristol, College Park, Athens, Kelowna, Davis, Eugene, Jersey City, New York City) most of us are still battling both a third wave of COVID and what the...