Unit Three: Texts in Context

Introduction

One of the principal ways that literary critics interpret works is to place them in context. This can mean putting a work in its historical or cultural context, and trying to understand aspects of it better that way. For instance, the emergence of the novel (sentimental and romantic rather than reasonable and erudite, full of common language and situations rather than elevated diction and idealized situations, and written as often as not by undereducated and inexperienced women!) in the eighteenth-century seemed a strange phenomenon, given that the eighteenth-century seemed to think of itself as the age of reason, decorum, and elevated thought and conduct. A little research into the 'real' eighteenth-century revealed a pretty raucous, diverse, emotional and exciting world in which the novel, as a representation of the perils and pleasures of human life, seemed to fit right in. And other research has shown that while the literary establishment may have thought of itself as "masculine," there were hundreds of women writing for publication in the period, and women were a significant market for fiction, poetry and other works of entertainment. But obviously the historical context of a work is virutally infinite in its possibilities; a literary critic, and a student of any level, has to decide what is and is not relevant. Researching a work's historical context is discussed in Section 3 of this Unit.

Putting a work in context can also mean doing biographical research on the author. Biographical research can help us understand where an individual author lived in history, what kind of literary and cultural influences he or she experienced, what kind of emotional or personal upheavals he or she suffered, and what special interests he or she had. Biographical literary criticism is full of perils and potential. Biographical resources are discussed in Section 2 of this Unit.

But first, the simplest of contexts: the environment of the words that the author uses. Just like plants or people, words exist in systems on which they are dependent for their denotative and connotative meanings. The histories of words give a controlled, but often bountiful sampling of the engagement of language, and authors, with their time and place. We will look at the history of words and how to find out about them in the first section of this unit.