Anita and Me - Context

This GCSE English Literature quiz takes a look at context in Meera Syal's Anita and Me. Context, in literary terms, applies to the environment in which a text was written. Context includes an author’s geographical time and location, along with contemporary social and political events. These aspects of a text’s context might sound familiar, because their fictional counterparts form what is known as “setting”. Just as a text’s setting refers to the fictional aspects of the world contained in the text, “context” describes the same aspects of the author’s own world. Where a text is set in the recent past, as in Anita and Me, historical context might seem very close indeed to the novel’s fictional setting, especially when the author explicitly addresses social and political issues. The consequences of Britain’s colonial past are very much evident in the novel, as they were at the time the novel was written (and still are now).