正祖의 文學思想에 대하여

Abstract

Jeongjo is regarded to be the very best king of entire Chosun dynasty, and even highly praised to be both the king and mentor simultaneously. He devoted his entire life for literature; as he was not fond of songs and women, he used to make use of his spare moments for reading books out of state affairs, and he didn’t even read secular writings for his life. Those writings are practically useless and even make human mind vicious and so its ill effect on the lower classes is unutterable. He even declared that he felt sorry for those who didn’t strive for practical science but for ideal learning. Jeongjo’s point of view on the literature is based on the doctrines of Chu-tzu. His literary idea includes a major premise that the truth only can be revealed through sentence. Therefore, his literary criticism as well as literary style begin from and end to it. In this period, Jeongjo stipulated new literary styles as grotesque, bitter, shabby, deadlocked, narrow and shattered, weak, frivolous, queer and unique, and he even attempted to perform the literary style restoration policy in that regard. A diversity of literary style means diversity of awareness. For a ruler who is required of one integrated faith of Chu-tzu like Jeongjo, it could be accepted as crisis in politics and idea. Jeongjo’s literary style restoration policy, however, was hard to be applicable from the beginning. It is expected that Jeongjo’s literary idea based on the doctrines of Chu-tzu shall be understood differently with the one pursued and intended by the literary idea of that time while thoroughly compared to each other so as to reveal its merits.