康承翰의 아동 서사문학 연구-발굴 장편 『힌구름 피는 언덕』과 『새벽하눌』을 중심으로-

Abstract

This paper has generally looked at the epic literature - childhood stories, boy novels and lengthy boy and girl’s novels - of Kang Seung-han. Especially, it was aimed to focus on his lengthy epic literature in “A Hill of White Clouds” and “The Sky at the Dawn”. The 1930’s is a valuable period where the Korean children’s literature finally makes its first fruit through various experiments and research processes in its desire to lengthen its epics. “The Sky at the Dawn” of Kang Seung-han is a work that is relatively at the front in that era. His lengthy boy and girl’s novels is the “longest work published serially for the longest period” on a children’s magazine before the independence, which had been serially published on “Children’s Life” with popularity. As such, it played a role of a kind of catalyst which promoted Korean lengthy children’s literature to actively spread out. This paper references childhood literature in “A Letter from Soo-young” and “A Dog-chain Hunt” as well as in the boy novels of “Photography” and “A True Friend” as representatives of short epic literature in handling the children’s epic literature of Kang Seung-han. For his childhood literature, “The Discovery and Experience of Ecology System” was studied, while “The Conditions of Destitution and the Super Class Nature of Human” was studied to grasp his world of literature. For the two lengthy epic literature works of “A hill of white clouds” and “The Sky at the Dawn”, these were interpreted as ‘the co-existence and the conflict between the modern era and the pre-modern era’ and ‘the desire and the discouragement in the modern space of Seoul’, respectively. The two works: well-express the social customs, individual desires and the poor aspects of the society in Joseon at the time, where the transfer from the pre-modern era to the modern era was being carried out; and closely draw the social image of the 1930’s with the adventurous detective narratives. This paper aimed to evaluate “The Sky at the Dawn” of Kang Seung-han as an achievement in the lengthy epic literature that shaped the joys and the sorrows of the poor lives of the people of the lower classes using realistic techniques with humanism in the background.