บริบททางสังคมและประวัติศาสตร์

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.

The house has twelve rooms; the social rules decide who is allowed upstairs.

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.

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.

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.