Texts in Context

Module One, Texts in Context, centres on the relationship between texts, audiences and contexts. You study in depth six poems from different historical and cultural contexts that are unified by one prescribed theme, either Love or Loss. TASC publishes the prescribed selections, so the poems your class reads may differ from the examples on this page; the methods transfer to any set.

A shared theme works like a controlled comparison: because the subject stays constant, differences in how poets treat it point to differences in belief, social expectation and literary convention across time and culture.

Criterion 2 asks you to interrogate context, which means questioning it closely rather than listing background facts. Its first element names five features of historical context: where a text was written or set, when, who was involved (the author, the intended readers and the people represented), how people lived (family life, religion, work, illness and death) and what happened (wars, epidemics, reforms and personal events).

Distinguish the context of composition, the context of setting and the context of reception, which is the situation of any later reader, including you.

A prevailing ideology is a set of beliefs so widely accepted in a period that it seems natural, such as religious providence, a fixed social hierarchy or particular expectations of men and women. A poem can endorse an ideology, question it, or reveal its pressure without stating it.

Interrogating the relationship between text, society and culture means asking what the poem assumes its readers believe, whose experience it centres and whose it leaves out, and how its meaning shifts when those assumptions are no longer shared. Tie every contextual claim to a specific textual choice; background that never touches the words of the poem earns little credit.