Semantic Change and Cultural Representation in English Novels Across Literary Periods
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65310/bhmqss72Keywords:
Cultural Representation, English Novels, Indonesian Literature, Literary Semantics, Semantic Change.Abstract
This study examines how lexical meanings and cultural scripts are reweighted across selected English novels from the Regency/Romantic period to modernist fiction, using Indonesian novels in English translation as a cross-cultural test of semantic portability. A comparative diachronic literary-semantic design was applied to eight English novels published from 1813 to 1925. The analysis focused on social-rank vocabulary, domestic and spatial lexemes, nature and interiority, and modernity and foreignness through contextual close reading. Three Indonesian novels—This Earth of Mankind, The Rainbow Troops, and Beauty Is a Wound—were examined through translation-focused evidence to trace how culturally embedded meanings are mediated in English. The findings indicate that social-rank vocabulary shifts from explicit classifications based on family and inherited position toward conduct, aspiration, performance, consumption, and social networks. Home and house retain their denotations but increasingly become unstable markers of belonging, while nature moves from a moral and epistemic counterweight toward aesthetic, technological, and urban configurations. The Indonesian comparison further shows that honorifics, colonial categories, taboo expressions, appraisal, and culture-specific terms may undergo borrowing, neutralization, explanation, substitution, or transformation in translation. Literary semantic change is therefore characterized by the reweighting of meanings within changing cultural scripts rather than by straightforward replacement of lexical senses.
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