What Background Is and Is Not in Defoe and Richardson

This essay attempts to articulate some distinctive features of the use of background in the fictions of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. To take up these features by reference to the notions of “description” and “setting” would be to emphasize the relative lack or imperfection of these features in comparison to the more “developed” nineteenth-century prototypes. Instead, the essay proposes using the framework of “background,” which can help us to consider eighteenth-century fictions on their own terms. The essay moves between some things that background “is” and some things background “is not” in these works to arrive at more refined, although still quite general, characterizations of these fictions’ “amplitude,” “depth,” and arrangement of “foreground” and “background.”