The chapter establishes the role of context in an analysis. This is done by defining context, presenting a context continuum that can be used to understand an object of study, and introducing the types of conditions that shape understandings of discourse. Six different approaches to studying context are discussed in this chapter: systemic functional linguistics, the SPEAKING model, frames, indexicality, contextualization cues, and next-turn proof procedure. After reading this chapter, readers will understand what context is and why it is important; be able to study context using different models and constructs; and know how discourse and context work together to create meaning.

This chapter identifies habitat as a crucial concept for literary animal studies. Habitat, as a biological concept, is compared with Jakob von Uexküll theory of Umwelt, a given organism’s subjective experience of inhabiting its distinct territory. Both terms are important for animal studies because they enable us to attend to the material and perceptual life worlds of wild creatures, ways of living threatened by habitat loss and climate change. I consider the distinct imaginative work of evoking habitat as a literary setting, discussing four literary works – John Clare’s poetry, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, and Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” – that connect human self-awareness with careful attention to the particular ways in which different species of animals dwell in the world.

Collins travelled throughout his life in both the UK and Europe. Places he visited are often used as settings within his fiction as symbolic landscapes

Chapter 7 provides a detailed discussion of cognitive context, communication context, and how they interact in conversation.It covers framing and relevance theory, and introduces politeness and facework.

This chapter sketches out some ways translation aids the circulation of crime fiction across cultures and literary systems, with examples from the early twentieth century and from more recent times. The importance of setting and ‘local colour’ is examined as a key factor in the popularity of certain writers and traditions across international borders, as are editorial and publishing decisions relating to such paratextual elements as titles, cover images and blurbs. One historical example comes from Mondadori’s series of gialli, which was enormously successful in Italy from the 1930s on and which included many translated texts. These works went on to influence local writers, resulting in the importation and adaptation of certain subgenres and tropes. A case study of translations into English of the enormously successful Montalbano novels of Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri provides the opportunity to investigate the kinds of choices translators and publishers make in preparing a text for a new audience and market. The analysis looks at the translation of dialect and non-standard language, culture-specific political and historical content and the value of translators’ notes.

This chapter explicates the ways in which setting matters in Coetzee’s writing. The settings assembled in its mises en scène are vital to narrative world-making; at the same time, they perform an indexical function that invests these narratives with ‘worldly weight’, thus establishing a relation to the real that is simultaneously fictitious and true. Tracking a movement from the insular and segregated state of apartheid South Africa, through the provincial-metropolitan axis and along the southern latitudes in Foe, Boyhood, Youth, and Slow Man, the chapter shows how these settings indicate a sustained and deepening sense of situatedness that is both informed by and larger than the national contexts of South Africa and Australia. Chafing against the national frame, the settings of these works elaborate the category of the provincial and then redirect it to that of ‘the South’. They function as neither tromp l’oeil nor exotic local colour, neither blank screen nor empty frame, but instead convey the substance of the ‘real South’ while locating it as alternative centre of gravity that generates its own deictic markers.

Atmosphere is both a literal aspect of the Earth system and a formal property of literary texts. This chapter takes up that double-meaning of the term. Taking the description of atmospheric phenomena in literature seriously helps illustrate the expansive entanglement between climate and human history, revealing changing attitudes to climate across time. At the same time, attending to formal atmosphere helps illustrate literature’s capacity to mediate, and symptomatise, climatic history and its impacts upon culture in ways that extend beyond description to include character formation, book production, and textual studies, while also elevating the importance of setting as both physical location and formal property. The chapter also expands our consideration of setting to include sites of reading along with those of composition or narration. Utilising Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a case study, the chapter advocates a mode of reading that situates literary history within the history Earth system, which is to say the study of the planet as a single, interconnected whole.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.