realism that can be seen from philosophical or religious, psychological and political viewpoints. Roberts in his book entitled Writing Themes about Literature
Second Edition said that “the setting may become so significant that it virtually
becomes an active participant in the action 1969: 42.” To study the setting of any particular work, the first concern should be to
discover all details that conceivably form a part of setting and then to determine how the author has used these details. This concern is artistic. One might observe,
for example, that the manipulation of setting may be a kind of direct language, a means by which the author makes statements that he may not interpret 1969: 43.
Another way to use setting as a kind of statement is to describe a setting in lieu of describing events, in this sense placing the setting on the level of metaphor.
The language used by the author to describe the setting is an important clue in interpreting his story. An author might also manipulate setting as a means of
organizing his story structurally, for example, to move a character from one environment to another provided that no harm is done in the process. Another
structural manipulation of setting is the “framing” method: an author “frames” his story by opening with a description of the setting and then returns to the
description at the end 1969: 43.
2. The Relation between Literature and Society
There is a close relation between literature and history. Pater Widdowson in Literature
said that the literary is a proactive writing of history in order to discover or rather, form out of nothing, an identity in a social formation whose
12 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
dominant discourses would consign a repressed group to silence 1999: 135. The texts are selected for their accessibility andor familiarity, but which nevertheless
involve many different kinds of production and which focus as a unique form of historical knowledge, issues of politics, race and gender 1999: 132.
The English literary term ‘the novel’, can be argued, retains traces of all these senses: ‘a new story’, new, innovating, strange-perhaps even marking
strange or defamiliarising and offering news-information or insight about social life 1999: 136.
3. Society
In the book Society in the Novel, Langland said that society in novels does not depend on points of absolute fidelity to an outside world in details of costume,
setting, and locality because a novel’s society does not aim at a faithful mirror of any concrete, existent thing. This intersection of art and life is important. Absolute
literary realism may be impossible, but art cannot help making claims to something beyond itself 1984: 5.
Society is the medium, comprehending not merely people and their classes but also their customs, conventions, beliefs and values, their institutions-legal,
religious, and cultural- and their physical environment 1984: 6. Society may also be revealed through human relationships, characters’ patterned interactions and
their common expectations of one another. Society remains potentially everything we have seen to be norms, conventions, codes, background, places, people,
institutions-but its particular manifestation in a novel will be dictated by its role 13
within the work 1984: 6,7. The novel was fashioned from the beginning as an instrument of social criticism. Expressing a new valuation of the individual, it
brings with it a new awareness of how social values might warp or deny individual values and needs 1984: 11.
4. Representation
