1930년대 후반기 소설에 나타난 생태학적 상상력 - 이효석의 '산', '들'과 정비석의 '성황당'을 중심으로

Abstract

This study presents a reinterpretation of the novels written in the late 1930s from the perspective of ecological imagination. During that period when the colonial rule had gotten crueler, novels took a variety of forms including pure lyrical novels and return-to-the-soil novels. Lee Hyo-seok seeks out the life force of spring that's common in humans, plants, and animals by adopting 'the fields' having a horizontal and feminine image in his The Fields. In The Mountains, he uses the mountains whose phallic images are strong in order to break down the dual confrontations between nature and civilization. He wrote those works during the time when the militaristic rule of the Japanese imperialism grew even tenser and thus tried to find the ways to resolve the conflicts between man and the world through ecological harmony. The harmonious coexistence of man and nature is realized through his ecological imagination and tells about the ecological order rather than the man-oriented epic. Jeong Bi-seok spreads his ecological imagination through the primitive and folk features in The Village Shrine. The folk religion based on the 'village God' is presented as one of the unique Korean religions that can challenge the practice to visit to Japanese shrines forced by the Japanese. He searched for the ways to engage in literary resistance under the conditions that hardly allowed for any criticism of the reality. It's important to notice that his ecological imagination is used to reflect the healthy primitive and folk features in the postcolonial attitudes. The images of 'nature' that the three writers showed in their works are considered to be one of their strategies to avoid the suppression in the late 1930s.