Raymond Williams begins his foreword to Languages of Nature with William Hazlitt's report, in 1825, of a conversation about the dead. ‘I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see’, writes Hazlitt, ‘would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr Locke.’ Williams's point is that if ‘the use of “literature” there is now surprising, where “science” or “natural philosophy” might be expected, the problem is as much ours as theirs’. This book is rooted squarely within that problem. Its focus lies along the disputed border between ‘the literary’ and the merely ‘textual’, and in the gap between definitions of literature in our own age and in what is now known as the Romantic period, a time of social and technological transformation during which literature became a site of ideological contestation, generating a series of questions with far-reaching implications: what constituted ‘literature’? What sort of truth claims or authority did it possess? What kind of community should it address?

If an important part of the recent rise of interdisciplinary approaches has been the exploration of the historical evolution of the academic disciplines themselves, then it may be of some help to our own debates to understand more about the theoretical tensions of this earlier age, not least because those struggles found their partial resolution in the development of the academic discipline of English Literature, which is today the subject of various theoretical challenges that aim at redrawing the boundaries between the disciplines.