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:
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“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 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.
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.
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 and 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.