ABSTRACT
It will be clear, from the argument outlined in Chapter 2, that an important feature of nineteenth-century literature is often assumed to be its qualities of representation, that is, the ways in which literary forms (fiction, poetry and drama) were explicitly used by nineteenth-century writers to engage with a variety of contemporary intellectual, social or political issues. A usual way of framing this engagement of nineteenth-century literature with social life is in terms of the relationship between a literary work and what is loosely called its historical ‘context’. Over the past three to four decades interest in the historical contexts of nineteenth-century literature has tended to draw attention to the political or ideological elements of literary works – to what some critics have called the ‘ideological work’ which they do. That said, there are several ways of defining context, as well as of understanding the relationship between it and a literary work. These differences in their turn have been influenced by a larger philosophical debate about the extent to which all knowledge of the past is relative.
