General Semantics In the 1930s, the Polish American engineer Alfred Korzybski developed the discipline of general semantics (not to be confused with ordinary semantics, the study of the meaning of words) and founded a school for instruction in his system. General semantics holds that language is a metaphorical abstraction that actually separates the human mind…
Tag: SETTING
Cold Sassy Tree: Setting
Cold Sassy Tree is one of many works—novels, short stories, and plays—that examine smalltown life in the American South, particularly during the early years of the twentieth century. Chief among American writers who chronicled small-town life was William Faulkner, who created a fictional county in Mississippi that he used in many of his novels and…
The Bonesetter’s Daughter: Setting
Peking Man Peking Man is an assemblage of Homo erectus fossilized bones found on Dragon Bone Hill, amidst the Zhoudoukian cave systems, thirty miles (fifty kilometers) southwest of Peking, China, from 1921 to 1936. Dragon Bone Hill was called such because local people knew it as a place to find the fossils they called dragon…
The Wives of the Dead – Setting
Eighteenth-Century Newspapers Hawthorne sets his story in the early eighteenth century in Massachusetts’ Bay Province, and his two principle characters, Margaret and Mary, learn of their husbands’ fate through men who visit them at their home. As one can imagine, news traveled slowly more than three hundred and fifty years ago. British censors kept a…
Winter Dreams by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Setting
The Jazz Age In the aftermath of World War I, American society went through a period of dramatic change. Traditional beliefs in God, country, and humanity were shaken as Americans faced the devastation of a war of this magnitude. The feelings of confusion and dislocation that resulted led to a questioning and often a rejection…
To Da-Duh, in Memoriam: Setting
Colonial Barbados By the 1930s, Barbados had been under British colonial rule for over three hundred years. Always a poor country ruled by a white, propertied minority, Barbados suffered throughout the 1930s. The rapidly growing population, rising cost of living, and fixed wage scale was exacerbated by the worldwide Great Depression. Riots broke out throughout…
That in Aleppo Once by Vladimir Nabokov: Setting
World War II and Occupied France On May 10, 1940, German forces attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. By June 9, the Germans had crossed the Somme River and effectively destroyed any hopes of French retaliation. In an attempt to appease the Germans and end the destruction they caused, Henri Philippe Petain (an eighty-four-year-old Marshal…
The Replacement by Alain Robbe-Grillet: Setting
The New Novel The term New Novel (nouveau romari) became associated with a group of French writers in the 1950s, most notably Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, and Robbe-Grillet, who rejected literary traditions of plot, action, narrative, and characterization, and created a new novelistic form that presented an objective record…
The Interlopers by Saki: Setting
World War I In the late 1800s and early 1900s rivalries between European powers began to intensify. Imperialist states were fighting over land in Asia and Africa, ethnic groups were struggling for self-control, and nations were competing to build larger and more powerful military forces. In addition the region had developed a system of alliances…
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: Setting
The Cold War From the end of World War II through the mid1980s, the world endured a period commonly known as “The Cold War,” a standoff between nuclear superpowers which constantly threatened each other with mutual destruction. During this time, both the United States and the former Soviet Union built up huge arsenals of nuclear…