Danjae Shin Chae-ho played an active role as a controversialist of a newspaper company and author of a historical novel to protect national rights and independence based on the idea of modern nationalism in the period of patrotic enlightenment. Based ...
Danjae Shin Chae-ho played an active role as a controversialist of a newspaper company and author of a historical novel to protect national rights and independence based on the idea of modern nationalism in the period of patrotic enlightenment. Based on this idea in the history of ideas, `Euljimundeok`, `Lee Sun-shin-jeon` and `Choidotong-jeon`, the historical novels that he wrote in this period, affected the historical novels of the 1970s and 1980s in the aspect of spiritual history. In the aspect of modal history, they accepted and succeeded essay writing about Korean history and historical personalities he had been constantly concerned with, contemporary history, biographical literature, and essay-type descriptive modes, together with the mode of a narrative in earlier ages. Such novel tendencies of his continued to appear also in the period of his exile. Compared to those in the period of patriotic enlightenment, his historical novels he wrote in the period of patriotic enlightenment, his historical novels he wrote in the period of his exile after 1910 focused more on fiction than on history, leading to becoming gradually developmental historical novels. It can be confirmed that they criticized and satirized the social conditions strongly. The satirical spirit in his novels succeeded that shown in Yeonam Park Ji-won`s chinese novels. The spirit of criticizing and satirizing reality, achieved in earlier ages, was succeeded through Shin Jae-ho to the Anti-Conventional School of Korean literature in the 1920s and to the satirical novels in the 1930s. `Kumhaneul`, a work typical of this period, is a novel in the form of a literary work of treating the events in a dream which was ever prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries and in the period of patriotic enlightenment. In the place of his exile, he was already criticizing and satirizing the contradictions in the national history sharply through histories, biographies that could not be created in Korea or novels in the form of a literary work of treating the events in a dream. From 1920, he came to accept Marxism and anarchism. Thus, changes began to occur also in the contents of his works. `Yonggwa yongeui daegyukjeon` reveals such changes well. This work withdrew a nationalistic historical view as a hero shown in the works of earlier periods and surfaced a historical view as populace that an ideal country should be created by the self-awareness and direct revolution by populace. This fable novel succeeds the modes and satirical spirit of that in the Chosun age and that in the period of patriotic enlightenment. It also reflects the current of ideas in a new age together with the novels of Anti-Conventional School or tendency novels contemporary with it. Shin Chae-ho continued his activities of works by mobilizing literary and expressive modes suitable to his location and reality in Korea in the period of patriotic enlightenment and in the place of his exile after the country was merged by Japanese imperialsm. He was an author 쇄 could express the literary modes and spirit of earlier ages in accordance with the flow of ages. The literary modes of earlier ages he accepted were never old-fashioned in his situation. He was a thinker and author who could preoccupy and show the ideas and literary modes required by the coming future by succeeding the literary performances of earlier ages in a developmental manner. Nevertheless, the research and evaluation about him cannot but be imperfect. It is urgent that the manuscripts of his works in North Korea are generally investigated, excavated and researched.