Tone (literature)

The tone of a literary work, in terms of analyzing literature, is an expression of the writer or writers' attitudes and/or feelings about the subject matter as well as about the audience. The specific expressions authorial tone and literary tone are also used in reference to written works. In the more expansive, intellectual sense, an individual can be said to have an emotional tone and/or a psychological tone getting expressed both before, during, and after the process of actually creating media.

For instance, a creative piece with a bleak, critical tone can be said to foster opposition against particular events and ideas alike, such as famous writings against international conflict and warfare promoting authorial ideals about nonviolence. This trend has included the controversial novel All Quiet on the Western Front about Germans during World War I and other literature adopted by pacifists. As well, a piece with a significantly sympathetic tone for a fictional or real-life person can function to mitigate or otherwise reduce criticism against that individual. Multiple forms of hagiography (literature about Saints and other influential religious figures) are examples.

The concept of a work's tone has been argued in the academic context as involving a critique of one's innate emotions: the creator or creators of an artistic piece deliberately pushing one to rethink the emotional dimensions of one's own life due to the creator or creator's psychological intent.

As the nature of commercial media and other such artistic expressions have evolved over time, the concept of a work's tone requiring analysis has been applied to other actions such as film production. For example, a study of the French New Wave movement occurred during the spring of 1974 in the pages of Film Quarterly commenting upon particular directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, noting "the passionate concern for the status of... emotional life" that "pervades the films" they'd made. Highlighting those creative figures, the journal found that the career path of such a filmmaker "treats intimacy, and its opposite, distance, in a unique way" that "focuses on the dialectic between" those contrasts as "they conjugate each other" and so the directors' social movement "uses intimacy as the dominant feeling-tone of its films" (emphasis added) thus.