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CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter contains the description of the literature that is related to this study. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part is Review of Related
Theories, which consists of the theory of literature critical approach. The second part contains a review of Chinese mythology, a general knowledge on the symbol of Bone
and a review on Peking Man, continued with Theoretical Framework on the last part.
2.1 Theories of Literature
The theory used in this study is taken from the fields of Literature, which is Critical Approaches to Literature to assist the writer to analyze the manifestation of
the meaning of symbol bone in conveying Chinese values. According to Rohrberger and Woods, there are five kind critical approaches to
the literature. They are the formalist approach, the biographical approach, the sociocultural-historical approach, the mythopoeic approach, and psychological
approach 3. The formalist approach concentrates on the importance to apprehend the total integrity of the literary work, so this kind of approach points out how the
meaning of literary works is delivered from the structure itself 6-7. The biographical approach states that the necessity for an appreciation of the
ideas, life background and personality of the author to dig the understanding of the literary objects. It can be said that this approach uses the biography of the author as
the basic of the analysis 8. In the sociocultural-historical approach, the readers PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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analyze the literary work based on the civilization around the author when he made the story. So, in this approach the attitudes and actions at a specific group of people
become the subject matter 9. The mythopoeic approach is used to discover certain universality recurrent
patterns of human thought which are considered sharing the same universal belief to certain community mind. In general, the patterns include death and rebirth, guilt and
sacrifices, and also primitive rites. The mystical relationship found in a story can be explained using this approach 11.
The last approach is the psychological approach which involves the effort to locate and demonstrate certain recurrent patterns – that is psychology. This approach
uses the theory of human psychology as the references to analyze the characters in a story. It asserts that each character’s behavior could be referred to the psychology of
human beings. Through this approach, the character’s thought and behavior can be analyzed more deeply 13-14.
The mythopoeic approach will be used to analyze The Bonesetters Daughter.
2.2 Reviews on Chinese Mythology: Bone and Peking Man