The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Contexts, 1600‐2000

The study of literature has long left the study of the “novel‐in‐itself” far behind. Now students are asked to “contextualise” an author's work, to relate what an author writes to the socio‐politico‐cultural background in which he or she, and their contemporary readers, lived. Novelists, dramatists and poets write what they write in response (directly or indirectly) to events taking place in the world around them, to ideas that feature in discussion, and to contemporary art and architecture. Jane Eyre is not just a story of a shy orphan girl developing into an independent thinking woman, but a reaction to, for...