『女子界』 수록 소설 연구

Abstract

Under the Japanese imperialistic rule, Korean students in Japan were engaged in various activities for enlightenment through a national awakening and cultural discourse. The students, playing a significant role in the contemporary intellectual class, established organizations to prepare for national advancement through the unity of overseas students and academic progress, in the hope of reclaiming the lost sovereignty through enhancing the national capacity and enlightening people. The publication of the magazine Yojagye (Women's World) in 1917 was the outcome of the intellectual collaboration among Korean female students in Japan. In this paper we examine how the women of that time developed their own opinions and what kinds of literary works they wrote, focusing on the novels published in Yojagye. The general trend of the novels collected in Yojagye can be summarized as follows. The characters of the novels embodied various discourses related to women's issues in the form of editorial writing. Enlightening subjects were dealt with through sentences of near-colloquial styles using a variety of descriptive methods and comparisons. The colloquial styles were familiar to woman readers, who could re-live their own experiences through the novels and reflect their mental states on the main characters of the novels.