Setting, Theme, Tone

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Setting, Theme, Tone
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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.

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Setting

• In some stories, the setting is purely imaginary.
• Gullivers 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

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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.

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Setting

• In Shakespeares 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.

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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 Janes 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 lifeto
  win happiness in the end.

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Final Setting

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

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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

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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

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Jane Eyre

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

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Theme

• Some themes are asserted openly, especially in
  works whose intentions are to instruct or
  persuade
• Alexander Popes 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.

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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 Orwells Animal Farm
  expose the tyranny and hypocrisy of
  totalitarianism.

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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 the 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.

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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 the themes of complex poems, plays,
  and novels, cannot yield their full meaning and
  literary power.

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Tone

• This is the biggieso PAY ATTENTION

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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 speakers tone of
  voice in order to assess his feelings about the
  topic at hand and about his relationship to his
  audience and his conception of their
  intelligence, sensitivity, and receptivity to his
  views.

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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 speakers 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.

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Tone

• It is helpful to note the point of view
• A first-person narrator may be unreliablebiased,
  devious, naïveso 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.

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Tone

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