Types of Context #1 (AO4)

Remember that AO4 asks you to 'demonstrate an understanding of the significance and influence of contexts.'

Intro

The texts, in this unit, are the poems and novels which you will study. Context is all that surrounds the text, or frames it. This might include:
• the author’s life
• the time in which the author was living
• the values of that time
• the historical events that had an impact on the author and his/her work
• the other works of art that were produced around the same time
• even the debates about the meaning of a text that have gone on since its creation


The poems you will study were not written in a vacuum. They were written by people who have lived and breathed and who were probably influenced by the same kinds of things as you, by the conditions they grew up in, by the political landscape of their time, by the people whom they lived with and loved. These all go to inform the poems that they wrote and often become the subject matter of the poems. It is therefore important to understand the poems in context, to understand what the times were like in which they were written.

Context is about looking at the bigger picture.

There has long been a debate about how much context should be studied in order to understand the text and whether it should be studied at all.

For the purposes of this unit, there are two main kinds of context:
• the context of production (the author’s context)
• the context of reception (what the text meant to others at different times)