수필가 田淑禧의 초기소설 연구 : 소설사적 의의와 장르전환의 내적 필연성을 중심으로

Abstract

The present study unearths and analyzes Chun Sook-hee’s (1919～2010) early prose fiction to determine its significance in terms of the history of Korean prose fiction and examines the internal necessity for her genre transition from prose fiction to the essay. After making her literary debut with the publication of the short story “An Old Woman on Her Way to the Country” in the magazine 여성(Woman) in 1939, she was active as a writer, publishing over ten tales up to 1957. The present study excavates the short stories “Garden Cosmos” (1937), which Chun published as a student in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Ewha Women's [ssc] College (present-day Ewha Women's University) before her official literary debut, and “Affection,” which she published in 1941, and focuses on them as problematic works depicting the issue of women’s self-realization from the perspective of female intellectual-students and as significant works in terms of the history of Korean prose fiction for portraying the superwoman complex for the first time in the history of Korean women’s prose fiction. Works published after the Korean War (1950～53) such as “Ordinary Husbands and Ordinary Wives,” “Ashes,” and “An Unfinished Book” likewise are noteworthy as women’s psychological prose fiction. Although Chun started out as a writer, full of unrivalled passion for literature, she came to transition in genre from prose fiction to the essay after undergoing cataclysms such as liberation from Japanese colonial rule (1910～45) and the Korean War. The present study sees characteristics of the writer’s prose fiction including the frequent use of first-person narrators, bold use of self-revelatory subject matters, and strict avoidance of temporal retrogression in the structure as having acted as the internal necessity for her smooth transition to the genre of the essay. As supporting evidence, it presents the essay composition methods explicated by Chun. As such, the present study will serve as one direction in research on her literature in addition to excavating and assessing her early prose fiction as women’s prose fiction.