What is (in) a context? - mini lecture and Q&A by Professor Ros Ballaster

This mini lecture was recorded as part of the University of Oxford's English Teachers' Conference in February 2025. The term 'contextus' derives from the Latin 'contextus': 'con' (together) and 'texere' (weave). A context is woven into a text. We will take a look at the different kinds of context you can bring to analysing a literary text: biographical; social and political; literary, cultural and generic. We will weigh up the relative importance of different contexts thinking about poetry published in the period of debates and legislation around the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth century. You will learn more about the history and the literature of that time and its continuing relevance in our own context today: especially debates about critical fabulation as a necessary response to absent, partial, troubled and politically problematic archives. Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English and teaches at Mansfield College. Her most recent book is Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2020). Forthcoming in September 2025 is Jane Austen's Fashion Bible.