경계인으로서의 한일 여성, 자기서사와 고전장편소설

Abstract

This paper examines the drivers behind women's participation and creation of literature during a certain period in the history of classical literature of Korea and Japan, and the resulting novels by female writers of the two countries. The purpose of this paper is to examines the driving force of the flourishing of literature during the Japanese Heian period and Korean Chosun period with consideration given to the literature, society, and culture at large. In the Chosun and Heian period, when people were subject to hereditary social classes and male bureaucrats held control over the closed society, women were victims of arranged marriages and had to passively depend on men in order to communicate with outside world. This paper identified women, who were the main agents of classical women's novel, as marginal one in the realm of culture, status and space. The suppression felt by women under the rigid class system came to be reconstructed by way of literary expression, and their lives’ ordeals were expanded to their views of the external world in its entirety. These drivers were what led to the birth of women's novel in the two countries.