【正文】 making up a setting (2) the occupations and daily manner of living of the characters。 (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”. 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。 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.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 the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.In addition to place, setting may crucially involve the time of the story—century, year, or even specific hour. It may matter greatly that a story takes places in the morning or at noon. The medieval background informs us differently from the twentieth century. Kennedy and Gioia note that in The Scarlet Letter, the nineteenthcentury author Nathaniel Hawthrone, utilizes a long introduction and a vivid description of the scene at a prison door to inform us that the events in the story took place in the Puritan munity of Boston of the earlier seventeenth century. This setting, to which Hawthorne pays so much attention, together 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.2. Local color writing /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.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.4. The importance of atmosphere in creating the setting Moral inferences drawn from most stories: 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。Look back once more at the title of the story. What does it indicate in relation to the whole story?Does the author (through the narrator) make any general observations about life or human nature? Do the characters make a