1930년대 농촌계몽소설에 나타난 농촌의 의미 - 이광수의 『흙』을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper was intended to examine the meaning of ‘a farm village’ in 1930s through Lee Gwang-soo's full-length novel 『Earth』. Owing to city-centered introduction of Western modern civilization which started after the Time of Enlightenment, the farm villages of Korea in 1930s have become a place where a premodern value and custom remain and simultaneously contradictions of modernization formed centering around a city appear. Such a reality re-appeared in novels and was represented in novels in 1930s in a standardized pattern in which the opposing structure between a city and a farm village could frequently be showed. In the midst of such phenomena, the farmers-illuminating novels such as 『Earth』 or 『Ever green tree』 represent the process in which ‘city-student’ classes visited farm villages and give an education in characters and hygiene ideas in a setting of farmers-illuminating campaigns that carried out centering around Joseon-Donga Ilbo. A farm village was a materialistic foundation on which ‘city-student classes’ are able to enjoy modern civilization and grow the leadership class of society, so that they had a consciousness of owing a kind of debt to a farm village and show a psychological mechanism for paying such a consciousness of debt through a farmers-illuminating campaign. Also, when analyzed centering around 『Earth』, it can be said that the farm villages in 1930s was a place where premodern habits and a modern legislation system were opposed and was ‘an internal colony’ where the difference in the inside of Joseon was clearly revealed and, simultaneously, was a place where a transcendent value was projected and demonstrated to imaginatively remove the difference.