【正文】 and time: we have an “old, shuttered house” and the present tense suggests time (though the present tense indicates much more than time itself in the story). The elements making up a setting are generally: (1) the actual geographical location, its topography, scenery, and such physical arrangements as the location of the windows and doors in a room。 (2) the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters。 (3) the time or period in which the action takes place, for example, the late eighteenth century in history or winter of the year。 (4) the general environment of the characters, for example, religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions through which characters in the story move. (Holman and Harman, A Handbook to literature, 1986) But often, in an effective story, setting may figure as more than mere background. It can make things happen. It can prompt characters to act, bring them to realizations, or cause them to reveal their innermost natures, as we shall see in John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”.First, as we have said, the idea of setting includes the physical environment of a story: a region, a landscape, a city, a village, a street, a house—a particular place or a series of places where a story occurs. (Where a story takes place is sometimes called its locale.) Places in fiction not only provide a location for an action or an event of the story but also provoke feelings in us. A sight of a green field dotted with fluttering daffodils affects us very differently from a sight of a dingy alley, a tropical jungle, or a small house crowded with furniture. In addition to a sense of beauty or ugliness, we usually build up certain associations when we put ourselves in such a scene. We are depressed by a dingy alley, not only because it is ugly, but because it may arouse a feeling, perhaps sometimes unconsciously, of poverty, misery, violence, viciousness, and the struggles of human beings who have to live under such conditions. A tropical jungle, for example, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, might involve a plicated analysis: the pleasure of the colours and forms of vegetation, the disfort of humidity, heat, and insects, a sense of mystery, horror, etc. The popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley” novels is due in part to their evocation of a romantic mood of Scotland. The English novelist Graham Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh novel. His ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter。 his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not unmon: the Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily Bronte wrote of them in Wuthering Heights, and literary tourists have visited StokeonTrent in northern England because it prises the “Five Towns” of Arnold Bennet’s novels of the early twentieth century. Thus, a reader’s reaction to a place is not merely based upon the way it looks, but upon the potentialities of action suggested by it. Places matter greatly to many writers. For instance, the French novelist Balzac, before writing a story set in a town, he would go and visit that town, select a few lanes and houses, and describes them in detail, down to their very smells. In his view the place in which an event occurs was of equal moment with the event itself, and it has a part to play. Another example is Thomas Hardy, under whom the presentation of setting assumes an unusual importance. His “Wessex” villages cast intangibly such as spell upon the villagers that once they leave their hometowns they will inevitably suffer from disasters, and the farther they are away from their hometowns, the more, terrible their disasters will be. For example, in the Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Vale of Blakemore was the place where Tess was born and her life was to unfold. Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives’ faces。 she loved the place and was loved in the place. The vale, far from the madding crowd of the civilized city, was as serene and pure as the inhabitants. Tess, imbued deeply with the natural hue of the vale and bound closely to this world of simplicity and seclusion, experienced her own delight and happiness though her family was poor. It was, to some extent, her departure from her native place that led to her tragedy. In The Return of the Native, the atmosphere of Egdon Heath prevails over the whole book。 as an environment, it absorbs some and repels others of the characters: those who are absorbed achieve a somber integration with it, but those who are repelled and rebel suffer disaster.Sometimes an environment serves as more than a mere place to set the story. Often, it is inextricably entangled with the protagonist, and even carries strong symbolic meanings. Cathy as an image of the feminine personality, for example, in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, is not supposed to possess the “wilderness” characteristic of masculinity and symbolized by the locales of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights. In some fiction, setting is closely bound with theme. In The Scarlet Letter, even small details afford powerful hints at the theme of the story. At the start of the story, the narrator describes a colonial jailhouse: Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheeltrack of the street, was a grassplot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, appleperu, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rosebush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that