고한승의 『무지개』에 나타난 동화문학사적 의미

Abstract

1923~1924 was the most important time in the literature history of Korean children’s story. This was a transitional period, drifting away from adapted western stories to rediscovering our own traditional stories and creating new ones. Ko, Han-Seung was a frontier of this time in the movement of children’s story writing. He actively published adapted foreign stories, folktales, original stories and plays for children such as ≪Eorini≫, ≪Saetbyeol≫ and ≪Shinmunye≫ in 1923~1924. Excluding the adapted stories and folk tales, his works published in this period (7 pieces of original stories and 2 plays) were compilated into 『Mujigae』 in 1927. 『Mujigae』 was the first compilation to be published in the name of ‘original children’s story collection’ in Korea. There are several similarities found in the seven original stories of 『Mujigae』: baseline stories show irrationality found in tales, songs are inserted to hint the main theme, flowers are used as motives, narrative form is that of verbal story telling and that the stories take the format of an origin myth. These forms of story telling were the trends of children’s story writing during this time. Although the pieces in 『Mujigae』 show limitations in that they did not move on to becoming novel children’s stories and stayed as tale story telling, 『Mujigae』 is valuable for it represents the children’s story genre and its style of writing of this time. Ultimately, the study of pieces compilated in the 『Mujigae』 holds great importance in looking into the sense of genre of children’s story and principles of story writing during 1923~1924, the developmental period of Korean original children’s story.