In sympathy for literary Americanists who will not see the necessity of an opening chapter on intellectual history, I offer this apology. I found myself wanting to describe, with typical Americanist transdisciplinary fervor, the relationship of science and American literature, but could find no model of intellectual history that would do justice to the subject – that would save the phenomenon (the anxiety of disciplinary relations) and not dissolve it. If I had considered literature (in the manner of Marjorie Hope Nicolson) to be moving gratefully behind science through history, or (in the manner of Karl Popper) as working diligently on problems given to it by science, or (in the manner of Michel Serres) as not essentially different from science, then I would have lost all the border tension between the principalities of literature and science that alone makes sense of the intellectual maneuvers of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Pynchon, and Norman Mailer.

Readers of this book will therefore be making a mistake if they believe that the first half of Chapter 1 is engaged in controversies in intellectual history and philosophy of science for their own sake. Within that chapter, I try to slide gracefully from these abstract disputes to introducing the particular intellectual contortions of Brown, Poe, and Hawthorne entirely for the purpose of suggesting the ways in which my theoretical and practical concerns have determined each other. Chapter 1 is, as a result, both preamble and conclusion. Nevertheless, I do not advise readers who prefer their evidence before their generalizations to skip to the second chapter.