Abstract
This work explores how the common denominators of modernity - neutral time and neutral space - were constructed from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. Central to this development was the normalizing of certain grammar perspectives evident across a range of practices from art to politics, science to philosophy, mathematics to cartography. In particular, it deals with the construction of historical time in narrative from the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular case studies of Defoe, Richardson, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot and Henry James.