Setting and Atmosphere in Love Stories

Setting in prose fiction is never merely a backdrop — it is a structural element that shapes meaning. The places where love unfolds, the landscapes that surround it, and the atmospheres that contain it are central to how novelists represent emotional experience. For Paper 1, you need to analyse how setting creates, reflects, and complicates the theme of love.

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Setting as Emotional Landscape

The pathetic fallacy — the attribution of human emotions to the natural world — is one of the most common techniques for linking setting to feeling. But the best novelists do something more sophisticated than simply matching weather to mood. They create settings that embody the psychological and social conditions of love.

The Gothic

The Gothic tradition — with its crumbling mansions, wild landscapes, imprisonment, secrets, and the supernatural — provides a powerful vocabulary for representing love as dangerous, transgressive, and psychologically extreme.