This study is about how the realities of peasants' life, the historical actuality they are in, and their ideological orientation are reflected and shaped in peasant poetry. The main subject that the agricultural community faced shortly after Liberatio...
This study is about how the realities of peasants' life, the historical actuality they are in, and their ideological orientation are reflected and shaped in peasant poetry. The main subject that the agricultural community faced shortly after Liberation was to solve the land system. Discrepancy between the classes of landlords and tenants under the rule of Japanese imperialism was raised as the core subject at the Liberation Period. Therefore it was natural that practical 1iterary activities at Liberation detect peasant literature and the content of peasant poetry evolved at the Liberation Period be focused on solving the land system, which came out of the enhancement of class recognition that liberating peasants is impossible without solving the land system.
Peasant poetry is a historical definition which indicates the poetry of agricultural problems as part of a discrepant structure in a society being shaped with regard to the aspect of peasants' lives. Peasant poetry is distinguished from the other sub-genres of poetry in that it selects as the object of artistical reflection the class of peasants who are incessantly being dismantled under capitalism, and seeks solution of peasants' problems. Thus this study has examined peasant poetry from the viewpoint of realism which reflects the realities of peasants realistically based on a positive work on the then peasant poetry, and observed its significance.
For this, in chapter 2 I observed the present peasant literature from the standpoint that it is possible to set up the position of peasant literature as a national literature since the then peasants' problems were recognized as a national problem. And in clarifying how the then peasant literature was evolved at the level of criticism and creation, I progressed the basic work for relation-analysis of these and the works then created.
In chapter 3, I looked into its historical orientation and reality shaped in actual poems. centering on the contents of peasant poetry on the basis of the basic viewpoint given above. Since this should be the core of pasesant poetry, I intended to ascertain that literature reflected its period and specifically how through this the appearance that poets recognized was realized in literature.
In chapter 4, I made the whole definition on peasant poetry from the viewpoint stated above. That was to synthetically observe the peasant poetry created at Liberation in relation to the then literature, the works themselves, and all-social problems, and to give an evaluation on the comprehensive current of the then peasant poetry and its position in literature as well.
Lastly, since the object of this study is related to the Liberation Period, it is verified in the analysis of peasant poetry to have accepted the reality or ideological orientation in that Period. So long as the temporal background is the Liberation Period characterized by extreme ideological conflict between the left and the right, and disorder in political system, peasant poetry could never be freed from such reality and ideological restriction. Accordingly the core of peasant poetry lies in the reformation of tenant or land systems that the left insisted on, which shows that the then peasant poetry, as compared to that in the pre-Liberation Period, was more biased toward the left.
This study which was meant to position peasant poetry rightly in Korean poetry seems not unrelated with the peasant literature at the Liberation Period being located on the extention of that under the rule of Japanese imperialism, and with that of 1970s and 1980s centering itself on collapse of rural economy and thus the class of peasants owing to industrialization after the partition of the Korean Peninsula was fixed.