The introduction sets down the blueprint and specifies how the argument builds upon existing understandings of the novel. Taking as my starting point the critical reluctance to acknowledge Defoe as the first English novelist, I trace the interdependence of Enlightenment thought, accounting practices, and literary realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also offer an overview of how theories of the novel have depended on the conceptual scaffolding of the antinomy. Long deployed by philosophers to structure unwieldy abstractions, the antinomy functioned also as tool to grasp the most diffuse of literary forms. Hence theorists as various as Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Michael McKeon, and Frederic Jameson all posit that the novel is built in the tense field opened between opposing forces. By contrast, Adorno’s model of the Leibnizian monad asserts that art is always already tainted by the outside world, partly constituted by empirical logic. Over the more popular antinomic construction, I follow Adorno’s conception of art as absorptive monad . I further explain the book’s focus on select Anglophone writers and the three prerequisites for aspiring to speak for the world.

The Introduction theorizes the relationship between natural history, the theology of nature, and the novel of English provincial realism. The chapter theorizes the idea of “reverent empiricism,” a term that describes the way in which observation and description in a strain of English natural history (from Gilbert White to Philip Henry Gosse) blended scientific observation with religious reverence. Providing an overarching account of how natural-theologically informed natural histories share with the novel of English provincial realism “reverent form,” this alters our understanding of the Victorian novel as increasingly secular and demonstrates that the theological heritage persists far longer than we sometimes think. The introduction lays out the idea that the twin reverence for minute details and for the commonplace in popular natural histories finds its cognate expression in literary realism, which likewise focuses on the commonplace thing and event. The Introduction lays out a historical and formalist argument that is specific to the English context, and demonstrates the connections between natural history, the theology of nature, and English literary realism.