The Social and Historical Setting
The definition widens
- In unit 1 setting was time and place. Here the CED adds more.
- Setting includes the social, cultural and historical situation during which the events occur.
- So a long novel's setting includes what people are allowed to do, expected to want, and punished for.
Select all the situations the CED adds to the definition of setting here.
Psychological states belong to character, not to setting.
Social situation
- Class, money, work, marriage, who may speak to whom.
- In a nineteenth-century novel these are not background — they are the mechanism of the plot.
- A character's options are set by the social situation before any choice is made.
Cultural and historical situation
- Cultural: what the characters take for granted — belief, custom, what counts as shameful.
- Historical: the war, the law, the migration, the technology that the events sit inside.
- You do not need outside research; the text supplies these through what it assumes.
Which part of the situation is this?
Sort each textual signal by the CED's category.
Read the situation from what the text ____ without explaining it.
What it treats as normal, and what it treats as shocking, are both readable this way.
Historical knowledge is not textual evidence. An essay that explains the period is doing history; an essay that shows how the text treats something as normal, urgent or shameful is doing literary analysis — and only the second can be checked against the page.
Which sentence is literary analysis rather than history?
Only the second can be checked against the page.
You need outside historical research to analyse a novel's setting.
The text supplies the situation through what it assumes; the page is the evidence.
Read the situation, not your own knowledge
- The evidence is what the text assumes, not what you know about the period.
- "Women could not own property then" is history; "the novel treats her inheritance as an emergency" is analysis.
- The second is checkable against the page, and only the second earns marks.
Match each list to what it reveals.
Three questions, all answerable from the page alone.
A situation pass
- List what the text treats as normal without explaining it.
- List what it treats as shocking, and ask who would be shocked.
- Those two lists are the social and cultural situation, read entirely from the page.
The novel never states that a woman's inheritance was legally fragile. It simply treats the news of a will as a household emergency, and gives the lawyer three scenes and the heiress none. The social situation is fully readable from that distribution of attention.
Setting includes the social, cultural and historical situation in which events occur — not only time and place. Read it from what the text assumes: what it treats as normal without explanation, and what it treats as shocking. Historical knowledge is not textual evidence.