일제강점기 유재형의 아동문학 연구

Abstract

Yoo Jae-hyeong left more than 90 works during the Japanese occupation. Among them, 43 children’s songs, four children’s novels, four criticisms, and one essay are verified to be children’s literature. Even though the number of works is not small, chronological list of the author nor works had been written, confirming researchers’ lack of interest. The purpose of this article is to look into Yoo Jae-hyeong’s works of children’s literature during the Japanese colonial era. First, it investigates Yoo Jae-hyeong’s activities and children’s literature in general and analyzed his criticisms, children’s songs, and children’s novel with detail. According to his works of criticism, his literary opinion was based on awareness of reality but not out of childhood innocence. His works reflect this opinion directly. The pieces of children’s song vary from a song which is inclined to the sentiment of childhood innocence but also sings reality of life or the one that recognizes and captures the poverty, and song which advances towards class struggle with reinforced recognition on reality. There are examples of songs that frequently use words such as boys’ associations and factories, and even prisons. The perception of reality in the children’s novel created more direct characters who act out to solve problems. The night school and teacher functioned as a major motif. The mediating role of problematic character led to the awakening and action of the main character. By exposing boys’ associations, prisons, brothers leaving home in his works, Yoo Jae-hyeong revealed the resistance to class and national contradiction and oppression and of the hegemonic colonial rule, which was overlapped by the censorship during the Japanese occupation. As Yoo Jae-hyeong had argued in his criticisms, his children’s literature works during the Japanese occupation can be summarized as the combination of the political value and the artistic value, in other words, of the perception of reality and the ideology of childhood innocence.