【正文】 ple, 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。 (2) the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters。An event occurs and a character exists in a particular time and place. This particular time and place is referred to as setting. A setting is the background against which a character is depicted or an event narrated. Its purpose is to provide an imaginary link between what happens in the novel and what the reader takes to be reality. Like some other elements, setting is not peculiar to the novel. The reader finds it serving the same purpose in different genres. The traditional way to tell a story reveals much about setting.Chapter Four SettingDoes the author (through the narrator) make any general observations about life or human nature? Do the characters make any (Caution: Characters now and again will utter opinions with which the reader is not necessarily supposed to agree.) When we say that the title of Pride and Prejudice conveys the theme of the novel or that Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath treat the themes of slavery and migratory labor respectively, this is to use theme in a larger and more abstract sense than it is in our discussion of Hemingway’s “A Clean, WellLighted Place.” In this larger sense it is relatively easy to say that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Updike’s A amp。opinion about, and statement of, the theme. P, and Faulkner’s Barn Burning concern the theme of “initiation into maturity.” Such general descriptions of theme can be useful, especially if we want to sort a large number of stories and novels into rough categories, but the fact that they are similar in theme does not mean that they mean the same thing. The attitude towards the theme may be very different: the tone of treatment may be, for example, either ic or tragic, straightforward or ironic. The writer’s vision of life is the special underlying fact of a story, and a theme, abstractly stated, is not the same thing as a vision of life. And we suggest anyway that, in the beginning, you look for whatever truth or insight you think the writer of a story intends to reveal. Try to state a theme in a sentence. By doing so, we will find ourselves looking closely at the story. Kennedy and Gioia make a helpful suggestion to consider the following points when we think about the theme of a story:Does the story contain any especially curious objects, mysterious flat characters, significant animals, repeated names, special allusions, or whatever, that hint towards meanings larger than such things ordinarily have? In literary stories, such symbols or metaphors may point to central themes.“Once upon a time there lived a king named Midas in Phrygia. He loved gold more than anything else but his little daughter.” Usually, a setting consists of time and place. It can also mean circumstances such as Midas’s mentality. A setting may be detailed or sketchy. It depends on the novelist’s purpose of writing and his idea of works of art. A setting may or may not be symbolic. Generally, a setting is more concerned with the physical aspects. Setting is closely related with exposition in that they both help to make possible the events in the novel. In fact, an exposition must have a setting. But setting goes along with every event in the novel whereas exposition is only the initiating action. (3) the time or period in which the action takes place, for example, the late eighteenth century in history or winter of the year。 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。Apparently, the author makes a contrast between the ugly jailhouse with a tangled grassplot overgrown with burdock and pigweed and something as beautiful as a wild rose. As the story unfolds, he will further suggest that secret sin and a pretty child may go together like a pigweed and wild roses. In this artfully crafted novel, setting is intimately blended with characters, symbolism, and theme.When setting dominates, or when a piece of fiction is written largely to present the manners and customs of a locality, the writing is often called local color writing or regionalism and the writer, a regional writer.……But it is a mistake to say that the atmosphere of a piece of fiction depends on the setting alone. (As illustrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the dialogue at the very beginning of the play helps powerfully to establish the atmosphere of uncertainty, in addition to the setting—the cold midnight castle.) The vocabulary, the figures of speech, and the rhythm of the sentence also help define the general atmosphere, for by these factors the writer manages to control the kind of associations that e to the reader’s mind. Atmosphere also depends on character and action. In short, we may say that the atmosphere of fiction is the pervasive, general feeling, generated by a number of factors (setting, character, action, and style) that is太陽能光伏發(fā)電系統(tǒng)基地建設(shè)項(xiàng)目可行性研究報告項(xiàng)目負(fù)責(zé)人：2010年10月8日７８opinion about, and statement of, the theme. P, and Faulkner’s Barn Burning concern the theme of “initiation into maturity.” Such general descriptions of theme can be useful, especially if we want to sort a large number of stories and novels into rough categories, but the fact that they are similar in theme does not mean that they mean the same thing. The attitude towards the theme may