Summary

Chapter 19 – In this chapter, Foster talks about the importance of locations and settings. Readers should always consider the implications of a novel’s setting, whether real, imagined, or somewhere in between. William Faulkner set the majority of his novels in the state of Mississippi, but in a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha. Geography is essential to plots, and where characters may live, die, meet someone, or do something, factors heavily into things. The Mississippi River proves essential in “Huckleberry Finn” as does Cuba in “The Old Man and the Sea”. The 1974 historical novel “Napoleon Symphony” by Anthony Burgess details that Napoleon’s failure to conquer Russia had much to do with the inhospitable winter climate. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” deals with a bleak and dying landscape, which is representative of the dying family that lives on it. Lawrence...