Main Definition of Terms

Critics who use The Formalist approach concentrate on the whole of the literary works because each of the esthetic part contributes a harmony to the complete work as a whole. Critics, who use The Biographical approach to judge literary work need to understand the important knowledge of the author’s personal life. A better understanding could be facilitated by some useful information taken from the biography of the writer and the biographical provision itself. To understand The Socio-cultural- historical approach we need some assertions as references such as socio, cultural and historical background. According to Rohrberger and Woods, those assertions are based on; firstly, literature is not created in a vacuum, secondly, literature form significant ideas to the culture that produced it. Critics, who use the Mythopoeic approach to judge literary works, attempt to find particular recurrent patterns of human thought, which are considered sharing the same universal belief to certain community mind. The Psychological approach involves various theories of psychology to explain the characters’ personality in a story. Each character’s behavior could be referred to the psychology of human being. Each approach which is described above has its values and limitations. The important task that has to the readers and the analyst done is to choose the best approach or approaches that suit for their appreciation on a certain piece of literature. In this study, the writer employs the socio-cultural approach to judge the novel by Jane Austen. 11

2.2. Review on England Society in Regency Period

Pride and Prejudice took place in England in the early nineteenth, during a time known as the Regency period. The term refers to England’s ruler between 1810 and 1820 defined by Donald A. Low as 1800-1830 and by Venetia Murray as 1788- 1820 when George IV served as regent to substitute his father, George III who suffered from serious mentally ill. The Regency period is sometimes called the age of elegance. By the early nineteenth, the industrial revolution had been in full swing for several decades and was transforming English society. Technology made commerce and manufacturing more efficient and profitable. As a result, many middle-class business owners and professionals became wealthy. The newly rich displayed their wealth in large country homes with landscaped ground, fine carriages, and elegant fashions. The upwardly mobile middle-class generally gave little thought to what was going on outside their world. The economic system that had made them prosperous, however, had left others struggling to survive. In the age of industrialism, work that had previously been done manually was now being done by machines, so it created unemployment. The country was living near starvation in which a situation that fueled social unrest. 12