【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 with our schemata concerning Puritan practice, helps us understand what happens in the novel. We can understand to some extent the agitation in the town when a woman is accused of adultery, for adultery was a flagrant defiance of church for the Godfearing New England Puritan munity, and an illegitimate child was evidence of sin. Without information about the seventeenthcentury Puritan background, a reader today may be perplexed at the novel. The fact that the story in Hawthorne’s novel took place in a time remote from our own leads us to expect different attitudes and customs of the characters, is strongly suggestive of the whole society, which is crucial to an essential understanding of The Scarlet Letter as a whole.Besides place and time, setting may also include the weather, which, indeed, may be crucial in some stories. 2. Local color writing /regionalism and the writer, a regional writer.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.A regional writer usually sets his/her stories in one geographic area and tries to bring it alive to readers everywhere. Thomas Hardy, in his portrayal of life in Wessex, wrote regional novels. Arnold Bennett’s novels of the “Five Towns” are markedly regional. Willliam Faulkner, known as a distinguished regional writer, almost always set his novels and stories in his native Mississippi.3. The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a reallife locale.The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a reallife locale. Literary artists sometimes prefer to create the totality of their fiction—the setting as well as characters and their actions.……The creation of setting can be a magical fictional gift in a novelist or storyteller. But whatever the setting of his/her work, a true novelist is concerned with making an environment credible for his/ her characters and their actions and in accord with the development of the plot.In some stories, a writer seems to draw a setting mainly to evoke atmosphere. In such a story, setting starts us feeling whatever the storyteller would have us feel. Thus atmosphere is a metaphor for a feeling or an impression which we cannot readily attach to some tangible cause. We say that an old farmhouse set among large maples, on a green lawn, has an atmosphere of peace. Here what we mean is that the house, by reason of the look of quietness and by reason of a number of pleasant associations we have with the kind of life lived there, stirs a certain reaction in us which we do not attach to any single incident or object, but generally to the whole scene. In the same way we may say that the setting of a story contributes to defining its atmosphere. For instance, in “The TellTale Heart,” Poe’s setting the action in an old, dark, lanternlit house greatly contributes to the reader’s sense of unease, and so helps to build the story’s effectiveness. Another example is Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” the description at the beginning of which contributes much to the atmosphere of the story.4. The importance of atmosphere in creating the settingBut 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(bào)告項(xiàng)目負(fù)責(zé)人：2010年10月8日７８opinion about, and statement of, the theme. Moral inferences drawn from most stories: Moral inferences may be drawn from most stories, no doubt, even when an author does not intend his/her story to be read this way. In “A Clean, WellLighted Place”, we feel that Hemingway is indirectly giving us advice for properly regarding and sympathizing the lonely, the uncertain, and the old. But obviously the story does not set forth a lesson that we are supposed to put into practice. We can say for sure that “A Clean, WellLighted Place” contains several themes and other statements could be made to take in Hemingway’s view of love, of munication between people, of dignity. Great stories, like great symphonies, frequently have more than one theme. 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。 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 in