East European Jewry During the nineteenth century, the number of Jews relative to the non-Jewish population in Poland rose steadily, from 8.7 percent in 1816 to 13.5 percent in 1865 and 14 percent in 1897. This growth was in spite of extensive Jewish emigration and was due to a lower death rate among Jews compared…
Tag: SETTING
The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses – Setting
When Head published ‘‘The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses’’ in 1973, South Africa was about halfway through the era of apartheid, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Although Head herself was living in Botswana when she wrote this story, many of her friends and acquaintances were, like the men of Span One, in prison as a…
One Ordinary Day With Peanuts – Setting
McCarthyism On February 9, 1950, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) made a historic speech in which he declared that 205 Communists were working within the State Department. This speech is generally considered the beginning of the period known as McCarthyism, a term used to describe unsubstantiated accusations of political subversion and disloyalty. Communism, which first…
No Witchcraft For Sale – Setting
Southern Rhodesia Zimbabwe evolved from the Kingdom of Mapungubwe, a trade state that sold its goods to European and Portuguese explorers up to the twelfth century. The kingdom changed rulers and names several times over the next 600 years, but by the 1880s, the British entered the country via Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company….
Marriage is a Private Affair – Setting
Nigeria in the 1950s In the 1950s, Nigeria was still under British rule. The British had controlled the country since the late nineteenth century, and it was the most important of British possessions in Africa during the height of the British Empire. The British brought with them Christian missionaries, and in Ogidi, Achebe’s home village,…
Love Must Not Be Forgotten – Setting
Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China in 1966 commenced a political campaign designed to protect and consolidate Mao’s power and eliminate any threat posed by dissenters and enemies. Artists, academics, and intellectuals were accused of being elitists, and their works…
The Leap by Louise Erdrich – Setting
Erdrich’s Family By 1990, Louise Erdrich had five children, three her husband had adopted prior to marriage and two biological daughters, both of whom were very young at the time ‘‘The Leap’’ was first published. Given these circumstances, motherhood and writing were the two endeavors that required most of Erdrich’s attention. It is quite possible…
The Heavenly Christmas Tree – Setting
Nineteenth-Century European Literary Movements Russian realism as a literary movement flourished during the latter half of the nineteenth century, which coincided with Dostoevsky’s literary career. His works and those of other prominent Russian fiction writers—including Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev—exemplified the characteristics of the realist movement. Russian realist fiction represented a reaction against the romanticism…
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment – Setting – Dark Romanticism
Dark Romanticism Hawthorne came at the end of the literary movement called romanticism, when the American version had evolved in several different directions. In Hawthorne, and in his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, the ideals of romanticism came to manifest themselves as an offshoot that literary critics refer to as ‘‘dark romanticism.’’ The romantic movement developed…
A Day Goes By by Luigi Pirandello – Allegory – Setting
Fascism The Fascist Party in Italy first organized in 1919, when Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento . The word fascio comes from the Latin fasces , the name for the ceremonial bundle of rods and axe that carried in procession in ancient Rome and symbolized the unity and the power of the Roman…