Often glossed over by literature teachers and students alike, there is more significance to literary context than meets the eye.
Importance #1 - Practicality
As a matter of practicality, literary context constitutes a quarter of the marking rubric for all set-text essays at H1 and H2 levels.
Importance #2 - Literary context bridges the gap between the reader and the text.
As a matter of appreciating the text, a robust understanding of the literary, socio-cultural and historical contexts surrounding the creation of the text in question bridges the gap between you, the characters and the space presented in the text.
Bear in mind that most texts are set in a time and space different from ours. As such, it may first appear that the actions and thoughts of some characters are incomprehensible or counterintuitive. Or perhaps, the settings in the text seem completely strange. An examination and understanding of the contexts surrounding the text, would thus, reduce the alterity of the text, its characters, its time period and space.
Here are some hacks to get you started on researching literary contexts online: Tag the phrase “literary context” or “socio-historical context” with the text’s title. For example, “socio-historical context of Pride and Prejudice”. From there, search for articles and pictures that help you understand the way of life of the people within the text.
Let us examine the worlds of 2 texts examined at A Levels, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (novel of sensibilities) and Regeneration by Pat Barker (historical fiction):
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
In the modern zeitgeist of marriage avoidance and the attenuation of heteronormativity, the “universally acknowledged [“truth”], that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” that opens the novel shows its age.
Perhaps, the utilitarian or vocational nature of marriage in Pride and Prejudice is foreign to those who view marriage as a union predominantly motivated by love and personal happiness instead. It is only in considering the inheritance system (entailment) of Regency England, in which the only eldest son stood to inherit the bulk of the estate, that the Bennets’ desperation to marry off their daughters (the wealthier the better) becomes understandable: As the Bennets are sonless, their daughters will be destitute after Mr Bennet passes.
2. Regeneration by Pat Barker
Set in World War I, the text explores the long-lasting traumas of the soldiers. In order to understand exactly why World War I was particularly traumatic, the reader needs to understand what World War I was like.
Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. New weapons such as poisonous gasses (mustard gas and chlorine gas) was used, vastly increasing the number of casualties. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than 16 million people, soldiers and civilians alike, were dead.
In many respects, WWI was seen as the culmination of industrialisation, imperialism, and capitalism – industry was made profitable again by the war, which helped to end the economic depressions that had created social instability since the 1890s; much of the war was fought in Europe over control of imperial territories; and technological invention brought the now-profitable industry to the battlefield and created an industrial war machine.
For the young soldiers, the overall belief was that WWI would be over by Christmas 1914 and a vast number of young men did not want to miss ‘the fun’. Their naïve outlook was quickly and rudely shattered as they arrived at the frontline and experienced trench warfare firsthand.
Importance #3 - Uncover universal/shared experiences across time and space.
Example 1: Across the contexts of WW I and WW II, there is generally a great sense of loss, rootlessness and loss of religious faith in the face of unfathomable violence, despite occurring at two very different time periods.
Example 2: The notion of human aspiration and dreams are likely to persist across time and space, albeit manifesting in slightly different forms. The holy grail, as a physical object, has become an enduring symbol of human pursuit. Just as historians are still searching for the mythical object, we find holy grails in our lives and pursue them relentlessly: unobtainable, out of reach, yet ever so tantalising. For this, Fitzgerald laments “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms further” in The Great Gatsby, “And one fine morning–”, we may awaken to the attainment of our grail… or to find ourselves in the company of the universe’s nothingness and cold indifference to us–our dreams, our hopes, our existence.
Importance #4- Literary contexts connect you with the ideological currents of the writer’s time and the writer’s intentions.
Contexts enable the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the purpose, themes and messages of any literary work, because writers are almost always inspired by their life experiences. These can be significant socio-political events, cultural shifts, and their intellectual environment/zeitgeist.
Let us understand three different examples of contexts in three texts:
1. Romanticism in The Prelude
Romanticism (with a capital R), refers not to romance or love, but to an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement. A reaction against the precepts of order and sheer rationality that typified Classicism and late 18th-century Neoclassicism, Romanticism foregrounded the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the emotional, the imaginative, the personal, and the transcendental.
As a resistance against the commodification of human life during the Industrial Revolution and artificiality of modernity (characteristic of the time-space/environment), Romantic thinkers and writers like Wordsworth emphasised on the primacy of the individual, and saw a return to nature as imperative and restorative to the human spirit.
It is thus natural that Wordsworth exercises his imagination and individual creativity through the use of metaphors; comparing the city to a prison that strips away individual liberty, “a house/Of bondage”, and himself to a prisoner, a “captive”, who “hath been long immured”. The vast “green fields” of nature are thus contrasted with the claustrophobic entrapment caused by the concrete image of the “city’s walls”. Further, Wordsworth personifies nature as an educational figure, capable of language and thus, communion with mankind, “the earth/And common face of Nature spake to me/Rememberable things” (Book One) and in Book Five, “my mind hath looked/Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven/As her prime teacher”.
2. Medieval and Renaissance Religiosity in Doctor Faustus
Marlowe sets the morality-play framework of Doctor Faustus within the wider context of Renaissance Christian humanism, in which intellectual and cultural currents contrast with those of the medieval period, where Christian dogma predicates all intellectual thought and currents. It is thus no surprise that theology in medieval times was known as “the queen of the sciences”, and scientific inquiry withered. In art and literature, subject matter was emphasised on the saintly and the mighty rather than the ordinary man.
In stark contrast, the Renaissance was an age of new discoveries, both geographical (exploration of the New World) and intellectual. The advent of Renaissance humanism ushered in a heightened sense of individual excellence, a passionate quest for knowledge and kindled the general spirit of discovery.
The protagonist of the play, Faustus, embodies the very archetype of the Renaissance man. Despite being a scholar of a multitude of subjects he craves for greater intellectual nourishment. Like the Renaissance man who craves to explore the world and enjoy worldly pleasures, Faustus desires “spirits to fetch [him] what [he] please[s]” and have them “fly to India for gold/Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,/And search all corners of the new-found world /For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.”
Yet, Faustus’ ambitions put him directly at odds with divinity. He makes a bargain with the devil (ever heard of the Faustian bargain?), and rejects God’s authority. Eventually, he is condemned to an eternity of hellish suffering. Marlowe’s dramatisation of Faustus’ horrendous fate and the chorus of the drama warn the audience against Faustus’ folly. This admonition would seem to make Marlowe a defender of the established religious values, showing us the terrible fate that awaits a Renaissance man who rejects God. Is Doctor Faustus thus an orthodox, didactic play that testifies to the inevitable and apposite destruction of one who dares to challenge the enduring moral laws of the universe, or is it a far more disturbing drama, in which those laws are oppressive?
We may find some clues in Scholar R.M. Dawkins’s opinion. Dawkins describes Faustus as “a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one.” Doctor Faustus has frequently been interpreted as depicting an awkward and uncomfortable clash between the rigid values of the medieval world and the emerging spirit of the sixteenth-century Renaissance.
Is it possible that by injecting Faustus’ tragedy with grandeur, Marlowe is suggesting something else altogether? Is it possible that the price of rejecting God is worth it? Seen in this way, Faustus’s hellish condemnation becomes a martyrdom for individual freedom. He is thus made the martyr for the modern individual, to usher in a new, more secular, modern world.
3. Religious Faith and Climate Change in The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The influences behind the post-apocalyptic setting of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is rather obvious to the modern reader (or rather, postmodern reader): The climate crisis and modern technological advances. In a Wall Street Journal interview, McCarthy reflects, “If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.”
Indeed, McCarthy's novel depicts an unrecognisable world, and an unrecognisable humanity: Although the disaster leading to the destruction of the civilisation of The Road is never explicitly explained in the novel, the novel depicts an uninhabitable world with almost nothing left: no society, no food, no animals, no hope, no colour; the air is always polluted with dust. An unnamed father and his son journey across an ashen, post-apocalyptic America, pushing a shopping cart of their only supplies and perpetually scavenging for their next meal. All the while they guard themselves against the “bad guys”– savage tribes of cannibals who vulture across the wasteland in their jerry-rigged, diesel-run vehicles.
Speaking of dust, its religious connotation as a symbol of death permeates throughout the novel: The world of The Road appears to be forsaken by God, for there is the earth is now a wasteland filled with dust and death. It seems that religious faith wavers in such a dystopia, in the face of extreme physical suffering and savagery, "On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world." For McCarthy who well-versed in Christianity, the religious allusions in The Road therefore, comes as no surprise.
Yet, not all faith is lost. Perhaps, it is in the face of extreme suffering that faith is sustained, or even, metamorphoses and finds new forms. One night, the protagonist realises he cannot get up again and cannot bear to kill his son (to save him from the cruel world) as previously promised. He tells his son to keep "carrying the fire", to keep hope alive even in the most hopeless of circumstances. The boy, like his father before his death, talks to a higher being, as if attempting to find meaning and order in a hopeless world. Instead, he finds solace in thinking about his father, "the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget." Instead, the boy's love of and trust in his father becomes a spiritual or religious-like faith itself, as his quest for survival transmutes into a pilgrimage to spread the good of humanity in an overwhelmingly dark world, or whatever little is left of it.
Importance #5- Speaking of ideological concerns, the writer’s stylistic/aesthetic choices that help to reflect these concerns are also often informed by the literary traditions that come before and/or surround them.
Some writers follow traditions and conventions, some simultaneously depend on and abandon said conventions, whilst others defy them completely. Why? Perhaps it's all part of the creative spirit: Writers want to be inventive in their writings! It also makes sense if we consider the notion that each literary-intellectual period is often a resistance against, or adaptation of its predecessor.
However, fundamentally, writers and intellectuals alike operate under a shared space, a shared set of conventions. Works, ideas and styles of writing often intersect, hybridise, amalgamate, etc... Thus, it should not be surprising that there are intersections or echoes between works of different literary periods.
Let us consider two examples!
Elizabeth Bennet of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice embodies a very different kind of femininity from that of the typically passive, vulnerable, and child-like romantic heroine archetype. This femininity appears to connect most directly with the independent and visible identity of modern femininity, and an antithesis of the Regency England's perception of women as objects of possession, incapable of greater thought and independence. As such, it is no surprise that Elizabeth Bennet, as a character, is revolutionary in Austen’s time, yet strikingly kindred with the modern reader.
Some of Sylvia Plath’s late poetry exhibits a synchronous dependence on and subversion of traditional poetic forms. The three-line stanzas of “Lady Lazarus” and such poems as “Ariel”, “Fever 103°,” “Mary’s Song,” and “Nick and the Candlestick” refer the reader to the terza rima of the Italian tradition. However, Plath only employs this stanza type/poetic structure only as a general framework for a variable-beat line and variable rhyming patterns, unlike the fixed/predictable rhyme schemes of the conventional terza rima form.
In conclusion:
Studying a literary text involves more than just reading it. It should also involve the research of its contexts. An understanding of said contexts will connect you to the themes and the style of the literary work in question, and heighten your appreciation of the text. So, is literary context still as useless as you think it is?
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