A Rose by Any Other Name: The Influence of William Blake, Walt Whitman and Katherine Mansfield on the Literature of Yi Hyoseok

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 외국문학연구 / 45호 / 347 ~ 380페이지
· 저자명 : Steven D. Capener

초록

It is no exaggeration to say that all the major writers of early modern Korean literature were influenced by Western literary trends. The 1930s literary critic Im Hwa went so far as to say that all modern Korean literature (in fact, all east Asian literature) had been imported and transplanted from the West. If we locate the beginning of modern Korean literature in 1917 with the publication of Yi Gwangsu’s Mujeong (The Heartless), then the next decade and a half or so saw the importation and imitation of most of the major literary trends. In fact, in the 1920s and early 1930s there was a concentrated effort to “import”Western literature mainly through translation in order to learn from it.
Until the early 1930s, socialist literature (especially that being promoted by KAPF) was the dominant paradigm, but with the disbanding of KAPF in 1934, this gave way to modernism that would dominate literary production for much of the rest of the decade. A major writer producing modernist fiction during this time was Yi Hyoseok (1907-1942). One of the aspects of Yi's modernism that has, as yet, received almost no critical attention was is use of the themes, myths, symbols, and even the titles of works of Western literature. Yi, perhaps more than any other writer of this era, was actively syncretizing Western literature with Korean literature to create a new,modernist idiom. This process was largely one of translation. Not a literal translation as Yi Gwangsu appears to have done early in his career, but rather an adaptation of themes, symbol, and sensibilities.
After a discussion of the process of “transplantation” leading up to the advent of literary modernism in Korea, this paper will examine how Yi Hyoseok incorporated symbols, themes, and even personas from the works of William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Katherine Mansfield into his literature as part of his modernist oeuvre.

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