Unlike, say, modernist or feminist literature, the essence of gothic literature is rooted in its setting and environment. In this short passage, the tone is markedly different from the mood and atmosphere, despite them all being related.Īmong the many genres in art and literature, the Gothic lends itself particularly well to discussions of mood and atmosphere. Why did I decide to do this in the first place? I felt the stage slipping away in that instant, my feet levitating and my head woozy as I sauntered over to the podium. All at once, the walls seemed to close in on me the glaring light of the projector in the distance made a menacing search of my face. The moment I stepped foot into the cavernous hall, I felt the onslaught of innumerable eyeballs, as droplets of sweat travelled down the bridge of my nose, cushioning themselves in my quivering philtrum while my stomach tied up in knots. This is also why ‘atmosphere’ tends to be more relevant in descriptive passages (rather than dialogue-based ones) there must be a larger environment for the writing to breed any sort of atmosphere. So perhaps it’s more helpful to think of these terms as ‘atmosphere and mood’, instead of ‘mood and atmosphere’ (despite the order in which these terms usually appear), as we often need to ascertain the atmosphere of a specific scene/setting before we can determine the mood of the whole passage. ‘Atmosphere’ comes under ‘mood’, because it concerns how places and settings make us feel, while ‘mood’ is about how the passage or text as a whole creates a certain feeling, and a passage in its entirety often includes more than just places and settings, but also characters and themes. You’ll also notice that the difference between ‘mood’ and ‘atmosphere’ hinges on ‘a literary text’ and ‘a place or setting’, but both are about how they make you – the reader – feel. At most.įor starters, the definition of ‘mood’ (“the way it makes you feel”) and that of ‘atmosphere’ (“the mood or feeling produced by a work of literature”) sound virtually the same. On my scale of usefulness, this is a 5/10. Mood: the mood of a work of art/literature is the emotional features of it, or the way it makes you feelĪtmosphere: the mood or feeling produced by a work or art/literature Tone: the tone of a piece of writing expresses the writer’s attitude towards the subject or the reader What are ‘tone’, ‘mood’ and ‘atmosphere’? This may be easy enough to understand, but if we examine ‘tone’ alongside ‘mood’ and ‘atmosphere’, things get a bit muddier, since they all relate to emotions, and so the distinction between them can be quite subtle. My conclusion there is quite simple –įigure out the speaker’s attitude towards the subject, and the word for said attitude is most likely also the tone. Previously, I wrote a short post on how to describe tone as it applies to literature.
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