What is a historical context and can texts be explained or enriched by considerations of context?

What is a historical context and can texts be explained or enriched by considerations of context? <Tab/>A definition of the phrase 'historical context' is the historical 'circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully evaluated and assessed'1. In looking at the historical context of literature there are different strains that can be looked at; such as the writer's …

…Book, (CD-ROM) Professor of English, Columbia University. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Longman, 2002 April McMahon, An Introduction to English Phonology, Edinburgh University Press, 2002 Jauss, Literary History from Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916, Penguin, 2002. James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922. Oxford University Press, 1998. Moody, A. David, The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot., Cambridge, 1994. Alan Roughley, James Joyce and Critical Theory: An Introduction, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Irvine Welsh, Filth, Vintage, 1999.