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The Manchurian Bandits in Modern Korean Novel：Focusing on Yun Paeknam’s "Around the Incident"

Seo, Jaekil 1

1국민대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the desire and the unconsciousness of the people in colonial Korea, by exploring the representation of the Manchurian bandits in Around the Incident, the popular novel written by Yun Paeknam. This novel attempted to describe both the legitimacy of Manchukuo and the necessity for self-government in Huabei, the North China, by depicting the Korean bandits who took an active part in the area from the Manchurian incident to the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s. One of the most important parts of this novel is when the bandits of Manchuria attempted to move to Huabei after the Manchukuo had been built and also tried to establish self-government there unsuccessfully. It appears to be a fictional reproduction of the maneuver for the separation of Huabei from China through Japanese imperialism, and the Kwantung Army that tried to build another puppet state in Huabei similar to Manchukuo. The protagonist Wang Myoung and his party, who had once been mere Manchurian bandits, begin the “revolution from the top down,” with the help of Qingbang, the Chinese traditional gangster, regarding Huabei as a possible space for the realization of their political ambition in the rapidly changing situation of East Asia. The Korean bandits centering Wang, who had once been a socialist, were set up as pioneers leading both the Japanese and the Chinese to begin the revolution under the banner of Great Asianism as Manchukuo had been built by the Kwantung Army. It also shows Korean intellect’s fascination and ideological turn towards the vision of the utopian Asianism, which was suggested by the Japanese socialist in the outline of Asia against western imperialism after the Manchurian incident. However, this ideology of Great Asianism lacked both the sense of imperialism/colonialism, and the sense of the dominant-subordinate relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

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