needs the unity of members of the group. As they think their culture is superior, changes will never be accepted. They protect the culture from external changes
that can damage the value of the culture. In fact, changes can not be prevented. It makes some cultures collapsed and extincted while the others can survive and
stable.
3. Theory of the Relation between Literature and Society
According to Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, literature is a social institution that uses language as its medium. Literature has a social function that
implies social problem such as tradition, norms, and myth, but it can not express the whole society as the truth. Author, as the messenger, just gives a little part of
life in society. Wellek and Warren state as follows: To say that literature mirrors or expresses life is even more ambiguous. A
writer inevitably expresses his experience and total conception of life; but it would be manifestly untrue to say that he expresses the whole of life or
even the whole life of a given time, completely and exhaustively Wellek and Warren, 1977: 90.
The basic source of literature is the author‟s biography. Before the author influences society through his work, society previously influences the author. The
author is a social creature who lives and absorbs value in society. Critic can relate the work of literature to author‟s social background, family background, or
society where he lives. However, author can not put all ideology he believed in the work of literature.
The old approach to see relationship between literature and society is to learn literature as a social document. Literature records historic event in the world
through author‟s idea. Thomas Warton believes that literature has a skill to record characteristics of time series. It is stated as follows:
Thomas Warton, the first real historian of English poetry, argued that literature has the “peculiar merit of faithfully recording the features of the
times, and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive re
presentation of manners” and to him and many of his antiquarian successors, literature was primaly a treasure of costumes and customs, a
source book for the history of civilization, especially of chivalry and its decline Wellek and Warren, 1977: 98.
It means that literature has a role as historical document that records some events in one time. Literature gives a picture of what of society that lives in one time
when we never know. According to Rohrberger and Woods in Reading and Writing About
Literature , state that “they define civilization as the attitudes and actions of a
specific group of people and point out that literature takes these attitudes and actions as its subject matter” Rohrberger and Woods, 1971: 9. It implies that
society deserves to be learned as the component that build literature. Society always takes part in building story of fiction.
C. Review of Related Backgrounds
