Definition and Characteristics of Fiction Prose
Fiction prose as a fictional story does not mean that fiction prose is the author's blank reverie. Fiction prose is a combination or collaboration between thoughts and feelings. Fiction can be distinguished from fiction which is reality and fiction which is actuality. Fiction reality says: "if all the facts, then this is what will happen. So, reality fiction is things that can happen, but not necessarily happen. Fiction writers make imaginative characters in their works come alive. Actual fiction says "because of all the facts this is what will happen". So, actuality means the things that actually happen. Example: historical romance, travel stories, biographies, autobiographies. Prose always comes from the living environment that is experienced, witnessed, heard and read by the author.
The features of fiction prose are that the language breaks down, can expand knowledge and increase knowledge, especially imaginative experiences. Fiction prose can convey information about an event in life. The meaning can be ambiguous. Fiction prose depicts imaginative reality because imagination is always bound to reality, whereas reality cannot be separated from imagination. The language is more inclined towards figurative language by emphasizing the use of connotative words. Furthermore fiction prose invites us to contemplate because literature offers personal interpretations related to imagination.
Types of Prose
Based on the division of Indonesian literary history, there are two kinds of literature, namely classical literature and modern literature. Modern literature includes new prose which includes novels, novels, popular novels, short stories. Furthermore, classical literature includes old prose that includes folklore, fairy tales, fables, epics, legends, myths, witty stories, stories of solace, sage, saga, saga, and genealogy.
Romance is a type of prose variety of literary works. The notion of romance was originally a story written in Romana. In its later development, the romance in the form of a story that tells the events / experiences of physical / spiritual birth of a number of characters at one particular time. This happened at the end of the 17th century. The development of romance reached its peak in the 18th century. In the 19th century came famous Roman writers, such as Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, F. Dostojevski. These romance writers were then followed by colleagues representing the 20th century, such as Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Faulkner.
Reader reception theory
Reader reception theory tries to examine the relationship of literary works with the reception (acceptance) of readers. In view of this theory, the meaning of a literary work cannot be understood through the literary text itself, but can only be understood in the context of giving meaning to the reader. In other words, the meaning of literary works can only be understood by looking at their impact on the reader.
Literary work as an impact that occurs on the reader is contained in the sense of concretization, namely the meaning given by the reader to the literary text by completing the text with his own mind. Of course the reader cannot concretize as freely as he thinks because the actual concretization that he is doing remains within the limits of his expectation horizon, namely a set of shared assumptions about literature possessed by certain generations of readers.
Horizon reader expectations are determined by three things, viz
The rules contained in the literary texts themselves,
Knowledge and experience of readers with a variety of literary texts, and
The ability of readers to connect literary works with real life. This third point is also determined by the indetermination nature of literary texts, namely the gap that literary texts have to real life.
Literary reception theory assumes that our understanding of literature will be richer if we put the work in the context of the diversity of horizons of hope that were shaped and reshaped from time to time by various generations of readers. That way, in our understanding of a literary work contained a dialogue between the horizons of present and past expectations. So, when we read a literary text, we not only learn about what the text says, but more importantly we also learn about what we think of ourselves, our hopes, and how our thoughts differ from the minds of other generations before we. All of this is contained in our expectation horizon.