노블과 식민지― 염상섭소설의 통속과 반통속

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reinterpret Yeom Sang-seop’s novels written between the middle of 1920s and early 1930s represented with the novel Samdai(Three Generation). Not to mention, my attempt is meant to newly evaluate the esthetic character and their status in Korean literary history. I appreciate Yeom’s popular fictions in this period as the products of his own narrative tactic to overcome the restricted reality of colonial Korea. Yeom Sang-seop was a writer who arrived at a scrupulous analysis for novel’s way of being in colony—how to be related to the common people of Korea. In other words, he realized the possibility which popular narrative might achieve and recreated it in his original way. It was preferably a methodical alternative to overpass his early short stories characterized as an intellectual literature, and limitation of the novella Manseijeon(Eve of Independent Movement). His popular narrative style might be the very way how he could project simultaneously people’s sentiments and writer’s viewpoint. It could be said that he accomplished his artistic intention through creatively adjusting the conventional grammar of popular narratives. The popular nature in Yeom Sang-seop’s novels combined multi-effects to imagine the reality of colonial Korea while valuing cultural mentality tradition of common people in Korea and also blocking the over inclination toward western modernity. Reviewing his full-length novels mainly written in 1920s from this perspective will certainly lead us to a new prospect in understanding his literature in general.