Essay | Texts and Contexts and How They Shape Meaning

Texts and their respective cultural context provide insight into the way values have been maintained and changed. Through a close study of the British novel, Lord of the Flies, written shortly after the Second World War by William Golding, and Marianne Wiggins' John Dollar, published in 1989 in America, much can be learnt about how the society in which these two texts were set has changed, as well as how some of the values have been retained. William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies with the belief that everyone is born with an inherent evil. So he places a group of boys on an island paradise, and in the absence of civilisation and adult supervision, what follows is inevitable. Marianne Wiggins takes this idea, and changes the gender of the children into girls, at the same time incorporating such issues as hypocrisy in the society, multiculturalism and racism -themes that...
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