CONTEXT AND IDEAS
How to write about the context of a literary text
This is one of the skills you’ll need to be able to master for GCSE. You need to be able to make links between the things that happen in a text and the context in which that text was written and/or set. This guide will explain what all of that means and offer some suggestions for how you can do it, with associated examples.
Contents of this guide
What we mean by the context of a literary text
There are three main components to what we call the context of a literary text:
Time - when the text was written/set
Place - where the text was written/set
Culture - what the customs and social conventions were in this place at this time
These three things are, of course, interconnected: our understanding of the place must be dictated by time, since places change over time, and our understanding of the culture will be largely determined by both the time and the place, since cultures emerge in particular places at particular times.
However, they are conceptually separate things, and should be thought of as such; after all, several different cultures can exist in a single place at a single time.
The two different types of context
In addition to these three components of context, there are also two types of context:
The context in which the text is set (this could be multiple contexts if it takes place in different times and places)
The context in which the text was written (and published/performed - e.g. who the intended audience was)
Often these two contexts will be the same – the text will be set in a context that is roughly the same as the context in which it was written. However, sometimes these contexts will be deliberately and importantly different because the writer chose to set their text in the past (or the future), in which case you need to take both contexts into account.
Some texts where the two contexts are the same
Lord of the Flies – though set slightly in the future and on an island, it’s essentially written and set in 1950s Britain; this is the culture that determines the boys’ behaviour.
A Christmas Carol – written and set in Victorian Britain.
Some texts where the two contexts are deliberately different
The Crucible – written in the 1950s during the McCarthy ‘witch hunts’; set in 1690s during the Salem witch hunts.
An Inspector Calls – written after WW2; set in the Edwardian Era before the outbreak of WW1.
NOTE: Strictly speaking, there is third type of context – the literary context of the text, which includes things like genre, literary movement and form (e.g. tragedy). However, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll leave this aside for this guide.
Why you need to write about context
At this stage, it’s worth remembering why you’re asked to write essays in the first place: you write essays to show how well you have understood a literary text. That’s what you’re being assessed on – your understanding.
To do this, you need to make arguments, contextualise evidence, explain reasoning, analyse methods, etc, but these are all just means to one end: they all help to show how well you’ve understood the text.
The same is true of writing about context.
You need to understand the context of a text in order to fully understand the text itself, and so you need to write about the context to show full understanding.
Here are some examples of how understanding the context of a text helps you understand the text better.
Knowing about the context in which the text is set helps us to understand and interpret the actions and motivations of characters
Knowing about the context in which the text is set helps us to understand the social structures presented in the text, including the relationships between characters
Knowing about the context in which the text was written helps us to understand the motivations and intentions of the writer
Knowing about the context in which the text was written helps us to understand how the contemporary audience might respond to the text and what the writer might be trying to get them to think or feel
To make this clearer, let’s look at some specific examples from texts you either have studied or will study at some point in the future.
Knowing that
Lord of the Flies was written shortly after WW2, when news of the holocaust became widely known
Helps us to understand
Why William Golding wanted to write a story about why people behave in such terrible, inhuman ways
Knowing that
Stories like The Coral Island, about shipwrecked British boys becoming heroes, were popular
Helps us to understand
What readers of LOTF might have expected and why they would have been so shocked by Golding’s version
Knowing that
There was strong societal pressure among the aristocracy in the 1600s to have a male heir to pass one’s title onto
Helps us to understand
Why Macbeth is so worried about passing on his title, and why he becomes so paranoid about Banquo’s prophecy in Act 3 of the play
Knowing that
Nigeria was a British colony between 1850 and 1960, and British officials ran the country
Helps us to understand
Why Papa considers English to be a more respectable and prestigious language than Igbo in Purple Hibiscus
Knowing that
Thomas Malthus argued that not supporting the poor was good as it would ‘decrease the surplus population’
Helps us to understand
Why, in A Christmas Carol, Dickens has Scrooge speak these very words, before learning that they are wrong
Knowing that
There was no welfare system in Edwardian Britain to help poor people who had lost their jobs
Helps us to understand
Why Eva Smith, who is an orphan, is forced to turn to prostitution when she is sacked in An Inspector Calls
Knowing that
There was a huge social stigma attached to having sex outside of marriage in Edwardian Britain (and more recently too)
Helps us to understand
Why Mrs Birling has such a low opinion of the unmarried Eva Smith when she comes seeking help for herself and her unborn child in An Inspector Calls
When and how to write about the context of a text
As usual with these guides, there are no hard and fast rules here. You can include contextual information at almost any point in an essay, as long as it’s relevant to your argument. And relevance is the key thing. You mustn’t just include context for the sake of it; this won’t get you the higher marks at GCSE or at KS3. The contextual information you include must:
Be relevant to the question
Form part of your overall argument
Be as specific as you can make it, including names and dates, if possible
With this in mind, here are the two places that you’re most likely to put it into your essays.
1. When you develop your explanation of a character or a situation in the analysis part of a paragraph
If the contextual information is about when the text is set, then you may want to include it in your discussion of the characters and the plot. This would be after a piece of evidence, while you are explaining how that evidence proves your point (your reasoning). You can use the contextual information to help you make your argument.
Below are a couple of examples of this. They are both just a part of a paragraph (otherwise they’d take up too much space in this guide), so you’ll just have to imagine the parts before and afterwards. They should still make sense to you, though, even if you’ve not studied these two texts so far at school.
In each example, the discussion of context is in bold.
An example from an essay about how Lady Macbeth is presented in Macbeth:
… In Act 1 Scene 7, Lady Macbeth claims she would be willing, while she was breast-feeding, and her baby “was smiling in [her] face”, to pluck his “boneless gums” from her nipple and “dash [his] brains out.” Here we see just how evil a character she is: she speaks casually about murdering her own baby, and she does so in vivid detail, without showing any real emotion. Infanticide is, even today, about the worst crime a woman, especially a mother, can commit, and for a contemporary audience this would have seemed even more monstrous and evil. This was a time when producing an heir was the primary function of aristocratic women like Lady Macbeth. Yet Shakespeare has her say she would murder her own baby. Moreover, he uses strangely vivid imagery, with the boneless gums and the baby’s smile, to convey … etc
An example from an essay about how John Proctor is presented in The Crucible:
… which helps to suggest that, for all his faults, Proctor is still presented as a brave man. In fact, defying the government at this time would have been especially brave because, for people in 17th century Massachusetts, defying the government was very close to defying God. For these early settlers in America, religious faith was the most important thing in the world. They saw their theocratic Puritan government as representing not just the people but also the will of God, so, to stand against that government, as Proctor does, was, essentially, to stand against the will of God. This makes it especially brave ... etc
In both of these examples, you should be able to see that the contextual information is being used to help explain the characters themselves within the context of the societies in which they lived.
Neither example is too concerned with the writers, though the first example does mention the contemporary audience (e.g. the one from the time the text was written).
However, you may want to use the context when writing about writers, as the next examples will show.
2. When you discuss the writer’s message, or the ideas contained in the text
If the contextual information is about when the text was written/performed, then you may want to include it in your discussion of ideas, especially if you are writing about the message that the writer is trying to communicate.
Including the context here will help you argue that the writer really is trying to communicate that message. Let’s look at another example. As with the examples above, it is just a part of a paragraph and the discussion of context is in bold.
An example from an essay about how Priestley presents ideas about responsibility in An Inspector Calls:
… all of which helps to suggest that the Inspector has more authority than any of the other characters in the play. This is important for Priestley because he uses the Inspector to convey his own ideas about the importance of collective responsibility. The play was performed not long after the election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1945 and Priestley wanted to persuade his audience, most of whom were middle class, that the socialist reforms which Attlee’s government intended to implement, with their focus on collective responsibility, would make the country a better place for everyone, including the middle class. He makes the Inspector such an authority figure to suggest that … etc.
How to introduce your discussion of context
Below are some useful phrases that you could use to introduce your discussion of context. You can see how some of these phrases, or variations of them, might be used in the three examples above.
This was a time when …
… at this time …
… for a contemporary audience …
The contemporary audience would have understood that …
… and for people at the time the play/novel was first performed/read …
… for people at the time the play/novel is set …
The writer is questioning the audience’s assumptions about...
The writer is drawing attention to the fact that, at this time, …
The play/novel was written/performed not long after…
How much context discussion to include in an essay
One final thing to say in this guide is that you don’t need to include massive chunks of context at arbitrary points in your essays, like in the introduction or at the end of each paragraph. This will get you some marks for sure, but it’s not really the way context is meant to be used.
Instead, you should weave it into your paragraphs at point of need. You should include fairly brief references to context, between half a sentence at the shortest end and a few sentences at the longest end, that are used to develop your argument and provide a more sophisticated response to the question.
This is perhaps the hardest thing to get right when it comes to this skill, which is why we’ve left it to the very end of this guide. When you practise this skill in class, though, this is what you’ll be tasked with doing - fitting relevant context into an existing argument in a way that makes that argument more persuasive.
Summing up – key things to remember when writing about the context of a literary text
The context of a literary text means the time, place and culture in which the text was written and set
Writing about the context of a text is necessary to show that you’ve fully understood that text
Knowing about the context in which a text is set can help us understand why characters do what they do
Knowing about the context in which a text is written can help us to understand why the writer wrote the text the way they did
Your context discussion must be relevant to the question and to your argument
Your context discussion should be as specific as you can make it, including specific names and dates, if possible
You are likely to include references to the context in two places in your analysis: (1) your reasoning, to help you explain characters; (2) your discussion of ideas, to help you explain the writer’s intentions
You should weave your context into your paragraphs at point of need, rather than adding it in big, arbitrary chunks