what are ways that political and social events affect literature?

Answer 1

Well, they often give writers something to write about, including Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Viktor Hugo, and even our own American author who was an early Abolitionist but succeeded in getting himself banned for being perceived as a racist, Mark Twain. Those authors wrote about things as they were, while others like Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, and George Orwell wrote about where society is headed on the current course. (NOTE: I would assume that every literate society has had such writers; I'm sure that a reasonably educated Egyptian or Chinese or Bolivian could add to the list).

Political events can affect literature by restricting it, too. Western news and literature, along with Bibles, have been banned in several cultures in the East, domestic religious groups have banned, burned, and Bowdlerized (good word, look that up and impress the teacher) a lot of literature, and in one case in recent memory, writing a book put an author under a world-wide sentence of death, Salman Rushdie (the book was bad, but really not THAT bad.)