조선후기 고소설 속 ‘아동 서사’의 문학적 장면과 사회적 의미－<창선감의록>과 <완월회맹연>을 중심으로－

Abstract

This article is based on the premise that the novel is a genre that presents a literary scene of a particular situation in human life, and it is a literary scene of collective representation that is closely linked to literary imagination. Among the many past lives that old novel remembers and records in the form of stories, this article focuses on the stories of children of the Joseon Dynasty, ‘child narrative’. To this end, I first confirmed that old novel considered the age of 15 as child, called ‘dong-hae(童孩)’, and viewed it as a “young and ignorant child” through the <Changseongamuirok>, and saw that it coincided with the age of children generally used in Joseon society. Next, I looked at the literary scenes of child narrative for <Wanwolhoe- maengyeon>. The main event of the child narrative is separation from the family, which is divided into ‘kidnapping and abandonment’ and ‘floating and begging’. The scenes of ‘Child narrative’ include some of the public's narrative memories and reactions about children's lives at that time, that is, the metaphor of children's reality. The actual decrees and historical records confirmed that the issue of child abandonment and begging in the late Joseon Dynasty was a major social issue. The main scenes of child narratives depicted in the novels are literary appropriations of ‘children's abandonment and begging’ which occur repeatedly in Joseon society.