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Agonizing conscience and ethics of the community on Currency of Lee Geun-young novels

Yoo, Im-Ha 1

1한국체육대학교

ABSTRACT

Novels by Lee Geun-young serve as an example of a modern literature that starts with the colonized Chosun in the mid-1930s, passes through the liberated South Korea, and then continues on with North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s. Lee’s novels zoom in on the fetishism of the urban intelligentsia, their ethical corruption, and the fall of the farm community, and present the conscience of the educated and the sense of ethics toward the community. His writing during the liberated period was moderate and yet critical about pessimistic reality. In his works, Lee, who moved north at the onset of the Korean War, consistently focused on the reality at farms in both Koreas and on farmers there. The books he wrote in North Korea mostly dealt with the perspective on the reality and the protagonists agonizing over a great cause and conscience, extending the lineage of the 1930s farmer fictions. Lee’s novels were popular in North Korea because of the farmer fictions he wrote as a new generation writer who emerged in the late 1930s. This means that an important category in the North Korean literature was a by-product of the realistic trends of the novels from the 1920s and 1930s. Lee opted to live under the North Korean regime but he retained the framework of the farmer literature despite the separation of thoughts, ideologies and regime. Lee is an author that introduced an example that branched out of the traditions of the modern fiction.

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