근대 한국아동문학에 나타난 중국인 이미지

Abstract

This study aims at speculating on the appearance of ‘othering’ with the Chinese as the center in the tradition of modern children's literature of Korea. Since the liberation of 8.15 numerous children's literature describing the ‘Bad Japanese’ have been published and the situation is still on-going. However, there are very few works that deal with the Japanese during the period of the Japanese occupation. Westerners also appeared very seldom. The Chinese appeared in five or less works. In those works, the Chinese has been portrayed as ‘A child trafficker and an acrobat’(Bang Jeunghwan), 'Bandits and a corrupt landowner(Song Young), ‘Minorities and the socially weak’(Choi Byeonghwa and Lee Jungwan) and the like. Despite a favorable intention to pay attention to suffered people under the colonial condition, nationalism coupled with a sense of being victimized brought out to take an unfriendly attitude toward the Chinese which might result in describing the Chinese negatively. To be exact, the works figured out not the Chinese in the lump but the criminals and corrupt landowners among them in order to develop the nationalism and the reality of class consciousness. However, it cannot be exempted from a suspect to distort the image of the Chinese if there are works characterizing the Chinese only in that manner. Fortunately, there are some works to portray the lower class Chinese in more favorable way. The image of the Chinese in modern children's literature is not far from that in modern literature in general. Since the appearance of new novels to desire modernism, it cannot be overlooked that ‘anti-Ch'ing, pro-Japanese’ sentiment operated secretly mechanisms operated secretly. However, it also can be conjectured that the latent sense of being victimized between the powers of China with strong image of the 'great country' and imperialistic Japan had led to characterize the image of the Chinese negatively. In the midst of this stream, it is noteworthy that there was also mutually cross viewpoints among the lower class.