What Background Is and Is Not in Defoe and Richardson.

This essay examines the distinctive use of "background" in the eighteenth-century fictions of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, proposing the concept of background as a framework to understand these works on their own terms rather than through nineteenth-century notions of "description" and "setting." Unlike fully externalized and visually detailed settings typical of later novels, Defoe's and Richardson's backgrounds are characterized by suggestive, minimally detailed elements that imply a larger, empirically knowable world beyond the immediate narrative foreground. This background is not metaphysically mysterious but formally inherent, creating an effect of depth and openness that reflects an epistemological stance valuing the potential for further discovery. The essay argues that this aesthetic and structural feature is not a deficiency but a distinctive worldview that has influenced the development of novelistic form and persists in contemporary narrative franchises.