조선후기 소품문에 대한 정치사회학적 고찰

Abstract

This article reconsiders the emergence and development of sop’um(a form of short essay) in the late Chosŏn period by placing them in their political and social contexts. Existing studies on sop’um tend to focus on individual writers and their works within the context of Korean literary history, or on the influence of the Ming and Qing Chinese literatures. As a result of confining their investigation to the literary realm, however, most scholars have neglected the question of how sop’um can be placed in the broader social and historical contexts of the times, and what circumstances specific to the late Chosŏn period stimulated the trans formation of sop’um as a literary genre. Against this background, the present article makes three points: first, factional divisions and stratifications of literati in the late Chosŏn period produced a new group of monadic individual writers who were estranged from the existing communities of literati, and therefore whose positions in the politico-social constellation became dim. Second, the representa tive writers of sop’um such as Yu Man-ju 兪晩柱(1755-1788), Yi Ok 李鈺(1760-1815), Sim No-sung 沈魯崇(1762-1837) and Kim Ryŏ 金鑢(1766- 1822) turned to sop’um, instead of komun (ancient writing style), for the expression of their sensitivities as individual beings. Third, the popula rity of sop’um and the intellectual movement for Practical Learning(sirak 實學) that emerged among the literati in Seoul and its precincts in the late Chosŏn period were not unrelated phenomena, but should be con sidered two faces of the same coin, i.e., the literati’s intellectual and cultural responses to the political and social trans formation of Chosŏn society.