The Institution of Entertainment and Moral Example : A Study on the Development of the Modern Indonesian Novel

この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました。This article examines how modern literary style became institutionalized in original novels written in Malay during the colonial period in Indonesia by dealing mainly with novels by Chinese writers in the period from 1910-1920. The earliest original novels, published from the end of the nineteenth century, were popular in nature and exhibited various features of modern novels. However, they also included features of entertainment-type novels which stood in contrast to the new, modern features. In the original novels by Indonesian writers, published officially from the beginning of the 1920s by Balai Pustaka, various modern values were reflected and the style of the modern novel was firmly established. This article discusses how such change proceeded by dealing with the above-mentioned novels by Chinese writers. These works presented modern and western values as an ideal to be upheld or an example to be followed. The beginning of this idealism was fundamentally the same as that of the novels published by Balai Pustaka. However, these novels did not develop into modern, realistic novels of the western type but rather into modern popular novels. This was because the writers expressed such idealism and didacticism by modifying conventional techniques characteristic of the entertainment novels. It can be also pointed out that this kind of style took shape in correlation to the social background of the time, including overall trends in society, composition of the readership and journalism in Malay. For the reasons stated above, this article concludes that in Indonesia the style of the modern novel became firmly institutionalized through the novels by Chinese writers of this period in which modern values were presented through a combination of entertainment and moral example