일본 동양문고 소장 세책 고소설의 성격과 의미

Abstract

This paper examines the overall aspects, characteristics and stature of the lending library manuscripts, and prospective problems in order, based on research on the lending library manuscript in the Oriental Library in Japan. The biggest gain resulting from the identification of the manuscript in the Oriental Library was learning that the characteristics which had been known as woodblock printing and movable type printing had either been originally included in the lending library manuscript or had originated through competition between woodblock printing and movable type printing. Moreover, it could be identified that the translated version of the manuscript is also closely related to the lending library manuscript. Thus, in the case of commercial publications, classical novels created by the manuscript and Korean translations of these classical novels must be treated with circumspection, and the existence of the lending library manuscript must be kept in mind. Another result stemming from the identification of the manuscript in the Oriental Library was the ability to empirically deal with the state of management within the lending libraries and problems with the lending library manuscripts’ readers. On the inner side of the back pages of each manuscript in the Oriental Library there remained numerous amounts of scribbles from readers who had rented books from the lending library account. By using this data, scholars could discover the readers’ status, occupation and gender which had previously been assumed vaguely, and through analysis of the scribbles, the real state of the lending library, reading culture of the time, and the consciousness and mental background of the readers was also investigated. Although research on the lending library manuscript is quite a new area in the field of classical novels, there has been some remarkable results in a short period of time. However, since research has only been conducted through limited materials, several issues have emerged. Problems that must be solved in the future research of classical novels are the following representative issues: as all of the materials found included information about the lending books from the 19th century to the beginning of 20th century, there is difficulty in the explanation of lending classical novels which appear before and after that period, and as most of the existing lending manuscripts are short stories, there is also difficulty in determining the distribution of long stories which were the main items loaned to readers.