Question

How might historical context influence a literary work?

Answer 1

Historical context often has a huge influence on a work of literature. Take the work of Charles Dickens, for example. He often wrote about children in very awful living conditions, like in Great Expectations or David Copperfield, and he was writing in the Victorian era during a major shift into the Industrial Age. Many children were working in factories and had truly awful lives. Or take something more contemporary like To kill a Mockingbird. The novel is set in the 1930s, but was written in the early 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and the novel focuses on a white Southern lawyer defending a black man who is wrongly accused. Fahrenheit 451 is about book burning, thought control and censorship to the highest degree. It was written in the early 1950s, at the height of Cold War paranoia and the McCarthy trials. Same with the play The Crucible - about literal witch hunts in Puritanical Salem, which is what the communism trials were sometimes called - "witch hunts". Historical events influence writers a great deal. Hope this helps!