2 ms·
Classic literature so frequently uses a setting that was already archaic to its readership, to depict that readership's contemporary politics. Literature isn't
by OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Classic literature so frequently uses a setting that was already archaic to its readership, to depict that readership's contemporary politics. Literature isn't exclusively escapism. For example, Arthur Miller's The Crucible is about the 17th-century Salem witch trials, but it was written to respond to the McCarthy trials of 1950s America.
- jhbadger 3y agoSimilarly Lawrence & Lee's 1955 Inherit the Wind which was a fictionalization of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" about a teacher being on trial for teaching evolution in the Deep South. Like with The Crucible, it was really talking about the current events of McCarthyism, as in the 1950s it was assumed that everybody accepted evolution by then. Although as later decades showed, creationism wasn't quite as dead as belief in witchcraft.