The question for my essay was to agree or disagree with: Some critics argue that you can only fully understand a piece of literature if you understand the historical events that were on going when it was being written. Others argue that each piece of literature is independent of its historical context and should not have to look for information outside the text to understand it. Choose a piece of literature from each time period that we've studied and support your opinion in terms of this literature you've chosen.
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I agree that each piece of literature is independent of its historical context and you should not have to look for information outside the text to understand it. It’s not essential, but knowing more about the historical events will add pleasure to reading the literature.
The Romantic William Blake’s outrage about industrialized England places into context his radical, socialist vision in works such as London. The misery Blake sees is depicted as a direct product of industrialization, not a general sense of urban decay. The Victorian Matthew Arnold’s use of science of the period is essential in understanding To Marguerite Continued. Arnold uses the geographical concept of the original continent, and the fact that all nations were one, as a symbol of the sense of connection all human beings feel but fail in their current, separated lives. The Modernist Joseph Conrad’s colonial context is essential to understand Heart of Darkness, which otherwise seems dated and racist to modern eyes. The fact that Conrad is writing deliberately through a colonial perspective to show what he saw as the negative effects of colonization makes the work more intelligible to modern audiences.
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