이태준 장편소설에 나타난 ‘편지’의 기능과 한계

Abstract

This study was focused on what roles letters inserted in Lee Tae-joon’s long novels play in the stories. Letters inserted in the novels made some contribution to heightening the completeness of the novels over time. Letters appearing in the novels formed a part of rhetoric of the stories, strengthened the likelihood of incidents, and supported the creation of the characters’ personality. The significances of letters included in Lee Tae-joon’s long novels written in the 1930s are summarized as follows. First, the letters play the role of messengers for communication and instruction between men and women in the stories. Second, the letters provide mechanisms for forming individuals’ inner nature and describing characters’ personality. Third, various forms of letters function as turning points. In Lee Tae-joon’s long novels, letters are meaningful as starting points of new incidents. On the other hand, as the writer relied heavily on letters in narrating the stories, the novels attained popularity as readable stories, but failed to show new possibility of long novels in the 1930s.