1920년대 아동문학의 독자와 텍스트 미학 연구­ ―『어린이』잡지를 중심으로

Abstract

This study seeks to demonstrate that the western romantic view on children contributed to the formation of unique aesthetic norms of South Korean children’s literature as it was proactively restructured in South Korea in line with the recipients’ expectation horizons and implied readers’ characteristics of the 1920s. To this end, the chapter 2 focuses on the gap between actual readers and children characters planned by the official contemporary venue of dialogue and media. The child characters planned by children’s magazines were those who had been smoothly incorporated into modern-type of families and school systems and as a practical subject of juvenile movement – one of the nationalistic society movements – emphasize masculinity. However, such a child character was far distanced from actual readers’ stances based on the colonial modern period with a lower modernity indication. Within the acceptance of the western romanticism represented by permanent children, there was such a gap between empire and colony. And the masculinity of children reinforced according to the request by nationalistic movement reveals conflicts between Choseon’s nationalism and genders. The author noted how these gaps functioned in forging specific text aesthetics. In the chapter 3, it was described that, according to the recipients’ expectation horizon, South Korean children’s literature witnessed the formation of tragic sublime beauty as the norm of its children’s stories. The chapter 4 viewed that the gender norm of implied readers differentiating boys from girls facilitated the furcation of fiction types into boys’ stories and girls’ stories. And the gender norm of the society back than moved further beyond the simple gender differentiation to function as a key factor of typical fiction grammar such as figure describing, plot, background, etc. The overemphasized masculinity as requested by the nationalistic movement contributed to building boys’ stories as a fictional norm in the mainstream juvenile literature of the country. This study is significant in that it identified the Korean-style acceptance of western romantic view on children. The research sought to find what the aesthetic norm was in stories, fictions, etc. of South Korean children’s literature according to readers’ expectation horizon and implied readers while trying to build types of typical repeated patterns in narration. This discussion is part of the efforts to provide a more active explanation on what has been insufficient in other studies on children and children’s literature within the macroscopic discussion on modernity and nationalism.