동과 서의 성애주의와 퇴폐주의의 비교문학적 조명:로렌스, 와일드와 이효석, 김동인의 문학세계

Abstract

Modern Korean literature has been developed under the influence of western literature since it was introduced to Korea about one hundred years ago, and from such a viewpoint of comparative literature it is necessary for us to study on eroticism and aestheticism of the Korean novels and English ones. For this purpose I chose D. H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde as two English novelists, and Yi Hyo Suk and Kim Dong In as the Korean ones respectively. There are many similarities of eroticism in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Yi Hyo Suk’s “The Buckwheat Season”. There are common factors in human, nature, and sex, and they are commonly characterized by the images of animals, moon and flowers. The mare has the common image of the vital life in nature, and the moon plays a major role in their techniques as the archtype image of fertility. Flowers are symbols of the living, mysterious forces of nature. In evaluating their works the merits of Yi’s literature might fall short of Lawrence’s one from the viewpoint of setting, depth, width and probabilities not as a worldly writer but as a local writer. Wilde is a representative of aestheticism literature in the history of English Literature. He was against Victorian vulgar materialism and moralism, and insisted on estheticism that art was superior to ethics. Yi Hyo Suk who wrote “Pollen” and Kim Dong In who wrote “Gwangyeom Sonata” and “Gwangwhasa” were influenced by Wilde’s aesthetic works such as “Salome” as one of his best plays and the Picture of Dorian Gray as the long novel. They share many common factors from the literary point of view: decadence, hedonism, and homosexualism. Compared with Wilde’s aestheticism, that of Yi and Kim is nothing but Wilde’s superficial imitation under the Korean narrow circumstances.