ABSTRACT
Texts can create a sense of place in two main ways. First, they can describe places, incorporating many different sorts of detail. Where this occurs in fiction, the effect is what we think of as ‘setting’. Second, place can be represented in how characters (or a narrator or poetic persona) are made to speak. This second way of representing place relies on connections we typically make between distinctive properties of voices and places with which they are conventionally associated. The two means of representing place work together to express complex beliefs, desires and fears about how human life fits into the natural and social environment. Evaluative contrasts within a text, between the country and the city, are an especially common device in creating a celebratory or critical sense of place; but there are also whole literary genres, such as the pastoral, which have established changing but recognizable conventions for achieving this (see Unit 4, Recognizing genre).
