Importance Of Setting In English Literature

Setting in Literature

The setting could be one of the most important aspects in literature; it includes the time and geographic location in which the story takes place. The settingcan help to develop a backdrop and mood in the reader, make him or her feel close and interested to the story. Its importance and kind is given by the use that the author sets in their works; in somecases the setting is merely physical, and in others like in the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s it can also include feelings and thoughts that set a mood without the need of space description. But in one wayor another, Setting is a fundamental element in literature and can be conceived in different ways.

Many Poe stories feature elaborately decorated rooms, described in great detail. Clearexamples are "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Pit and the Pendulum", “The Fall of the House of Usher". A different situation is seen on "The Black Cat". In this story we have several differentsettings, but none of them are given much physical description. The narrator is writing his last words. He might not have had time to fool around with certain details, like when and where. Besides, we don'tneed the specifics. The story is about the bad things that can happen at home. “One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided mypresence”. The author makes reference to a home but vagueness of it in the story allows it to be any homes, anywhere. So we can say that Poe’s stories use different types of settings but in all of them they arecompletely necessary to develop the author’s purpose.

A case, in which the setting is well described in a physical way, is in “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov. “It was a dark autumn night. The oldbanker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening”. We start the story contextualizing the reader in a specific period of...