Setting Theme Tone Setting The setting is the

Setting, Theme, Tone

Setting • The setting is the time and place in which the events in a work of fiction, drama, or narrative poetry occur. • Individual episodes within a work may have separate, specific settings. • Time may be a historical period, time of year, and/or time of day or night. • Place may refer to a geographical location, a kind of building, or a part of a larger structure, such as a cave or a particular room.

Setting • In some stories, the setting is purely imaginary. – Gulliver’s Travels – The Lord of the Rings – Twelfth Night • The setting may shift between two contrasting places: – The idyllic raft on the Mississippi River and the contentious land in Huck Finn – Sensual, decadent Egypt and coldly rational imperial Rome in Antony and Cleopatra

Setting • Setting is an essential element in establishing the atmosphere – In Romeo and Juliet, it is set in Italy, reputed during the Renaissance to be a land of passionate romance and sudden violence. – The time setting in the play is also significant: mid-July, the hottest point in the hottest season in that southern climate. – The climactic duel that sets events on their tragic course occurs in a Verona piazza at high noon.

Setting • In Shakespeare’s Macbeth the precipitating event to the tragedy is a brutal, carefully plotted assassination, the murder takes place in an isolated chamber of a castle in the dead of night.

Setting--Location • In Jane Eyre, each of the locations have a symbolic name: – Lowood is located in a low-lying valley and run by a tyrannical clergyman who “would” wish to keep the social status of the hapless orphans in his charge “low” and humble. – Thornfield, the manor house of Jane’s beloved but morally compromised Mr. Rochester, is surrounded by thorn trees and is also the site of the trials that she must undergo— “thorns” in her life—to win happiness in the end.

Final Setting • The connection between setting and story is not often explicit, but it is always significant. • The author’s choice about time and place exert an important influence on a work’s tone and meaning, which the reader must infer.

Theme • The theme of a literary work is a central idea that it conveys, either directly or implicitly. • Usually covers abstract topics that recur in many works of literature: – Courtship – Horrors of war – Conflict between parents and children

Theme • A narrower meaning of theme is a view of a value conveyed by a particular literary work. • It is not the subject of a work • It expresses a stance toward the subject as a moral or philosophical principle inherent in the work

Jane Eyre • The subject of Jane Eyre is an orphan girl’s growth to womanhood in nineteenth-century England. • The novels themes include the importance of being true to one’s values and the transforming power of romantic love.

Theme • Some themes are asserted openly, especially in works’ whose intentions are to instruct or persuade: – Alexander Pope’s poem, “An Essay on Man” is meant to teach such principles as morality and piety: • • “Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar; Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore! What future bliss, he gives thee not to show, But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

Direct Themes • Other examples of works that state their themes explicitly are plays by such dramatists as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, which focus on themes like the rights of women and the evils of military profiteering • Satires such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm expose the tyranny and hypocrisy of totalitarianism.

Theme • In most works, however, a theme emerges by implication and is conveyed by the choices that the author makes about the narration and the tone. • One of themes of Huck Finn is that true morality depends on sympathy for others’ suffering rather than on rules of conduct imposed by society or organized religion. • This idea is never stated outright. • It is suggested by the characters.

Final Theme • Recognizing a theme can help readers to compare and contrast works that treat the same central concept and to articulate the values and attitudes that underlie a given literary work. • It is important to keep in mind that simply summing up themes of complex poems, plays, and novels, cannot yield their full meaning and literary power.

Tone • This is the biggie—so PAY ATTENTION

Tone • Tone designates the attitude that a literary speaker expresses toward his or her subject matter and audience. • The term is derived from spoken discourse, in which listeners attend to a speaker’s tone of voice in order to assess his feelings about the topic at hand about his relationship to his audience and his conception of their intelligence, sensitivity, and receptivity to his views.

Tone • Tone is described in adjectives that express emotion or manner: – Compassionate, judgmental, scornful, reverent, formal, casual, arrogant, obsequious, serious, ironic, irate, serene, confident, timid, etc. • It may remain consistent, or it may change markedly at some point. • In conversation, we receive clues to tone from the speaker’s facial expressions, gestures, and vocal inflections. • In written discourse, tone must be inferred from such factors as the syntax, diction, point of view, and selection of details.

Tone • It is helpful to note the point of view • A first-person narrator may be unreliable—biased, devious, naïve—so that the tone that he or she takes is meant to be seen as exaggerated or misleading. • A third-person narrator, whether intrusive or objective, may adopt a tone that seems authoritative and neutral. • A surface attitude of objectivity, however, may imply an underlying meaning at odds with that tone, creating verbal irony.

Tone • A narrative may create pathos—the evocation in the audience of pity, tenderness, compassion, or sorrow.