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The rise of a historical romance and its accommodation for the literary hierarchy – with focus on its relationship with the concept of popular literature

Chiyoung Kim 1

1대구가톨릭대학교

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ABSTRACT

In this paper, I searched how Korean historical romance was accepted in the modern literary circle and how the literary hierarchy rose and established in the Korean colonial period. In the late 1920s, the movement for a historical romance rose by Kim Jingu, who was greatly affected from Japanese historical storytelling during his studying abroad. Kim Jingu tried to foster a collective identity among the ordinary Korean by making a public convention listening historical storytelling, in which the ordinary Korean multitude could recall their collective past. However, the Japanese colonial government strictly censored this kind of conventions, thus the historical romance had to change its contents and became a simple stories of amusement which were grounded in old books written in Chinese characters in the past such as Chosun dynasty. In the 1930s, a historical romance became one of the major genre of radio entertainment, and professional magazines for a historical storytelling started to be issued and got a great attention by the public. In this vein, the style of a historical romance started to be recognized as a literary genre, which was very vulgar and low-graded, thus the major literary circle criticized the quality of the stories hardly. However, the genre started to be included in the modern literary genre system and became the major representation of a popular literature which was not conceptually established cleary still in the early 1930s. In other words, the concept of popular literature started to be outlined cleary when the historical romance was recognized and accepted as one of the genre of “literature,” and the official literary hierarchy started to be recognized when this genre got an official attention and was accepted as a literature.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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