This document discusses different types of settings that authors use in literary works: - Intimate settings require detailed first-hand knowledge, like James Joyce's Dublin. Other settings can be conjured from stereotypes without direct experience. - Some settings demand research into locations, customs, and terrain. Others are based on real places but use fictional names. - Entirely imaginary settings include Dante's Inferno. Symbolic settings represent deeper meanings, like Conrad's Heart of Darkness. - Settings can also be minimal or shift suddenly in dreams/satire to criticize life or advance themes in unconventional ways. The type of setting influences the work.

1. Setting
• Setting is the time and place of a literary work.
• It can present obstacles that influence or
determine the action.
• Depending on how it is used, setting might be
integral to the theme of the story.

2. Intimate and Realistic
• Some settings require personal and detailed knowledge
that an author has acquired first-hand. It may or may not
be the writer’s hometown.
• It doesn’t have to be an autobiography. In a novel of
emergence, the setting is significant since children are
often sensitive to their environment.
• James Joyce’s Dublin
• James Baldwin’s Harlem

3. Stock Footage
• Some settings do not require an intimate knowledge
of the place.
• Almost any well-known place in the world can be
conjured up with stereotypes and stock shots.
• Even if a writer hasn’t travelled to New York or done
any research on New York, the writer can use
whatever general knowledge he/she has to write a
plausible story set in New York.
• Old Hollywood films are especially notorious for
creating sets out of stereotypes- the French café, the
canals of Venice, Tarzan’s jungles, etc.
• Examples include the classic Casablanca and the
recent Enchanted.

4. Researched
• Some settings require careful research, even if an author
doesn’t intend on experiencing the setting firsthand.
• Authors might rely on histories, artifacts, architecture,
journals, and geographical resources.
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves requires more than general
stock footage knowledge of ancient Rome.
• The setting might be in a foreign country, and a writer
might need to research the customs, landmarks, terrain,
politics, etc., of a country before writing.

5. Real Place, Fictitious Names
• Some writers base their work on real places but change
the names of the towns.
• Why?
– Creative and artistic liberties
– Protect the innocent
– Protect themselves
• Examples include Thomas Hardy’s Wessex for Dorset
and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha for Mississippi.

6. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex

7. Imaginary Settings
• Some places are entirely the
work of the author’s mind.
• Examples range from Dante’s
The Divine Comedy to Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World to
George Lucas’s Star Wars.

8. Dream
• In a dream, almost
anything can happen.
• Settings can shift
suddenly.
• They are often surreal
and symbolic.
• Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”
is a dream poem.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome
decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river,
ran
Through caverns measureless
to man
Down to a sunless sea.
--an excerpt from “Kubla
Khan”

9. Symbolic
• Some settings may be based on a real place but
function symbolically in the story.
• In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the
characters journey to the center of Africa and
learn about the complexities of the human heart
in conflict with itself in the process.

10. Satire
• Some settings are designed to criticize
contemporary life.
• In order for this to be effective, you not
only have to create an effective imaginary
setting, you have to understand the real
place that is being satirized.
• Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is an
example.

11. A map from Gulliver’s Travels

12. Minimal and Generic
• Some works take place in a setting that is never
identified as a specific or real place.
• It could be any living room, any bar, any village, any
forest…
• “Once upon a time in a kingdom by the sea…”
• Thorton Wilder’s Our Town
• Lars Van Trier’s Dogville

13. This is still frame from the film Dogville. Though not an
uncommon setting on the stage, this is an extremely generic
setting for a film.