전후 순정소설의 소녀성 재편: 『학원명작선집』 수록 최정희･강신재의 소설을 중심으로 = Reconfiguring Girlhood in Postwar Korean Sunjeong Fiction : A Study of Choi Jeonghee and Kang Sinjae’s Novels in the Hakwon Masterpiece Series

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines how postwar Korean Sunjeong fiction constructed and reconfigured ideals of desirable girlhood, focusing on Choi Jeonghee’s Girls Counting the Stars (Byeoreul Heneun Sonyeodeul, 별을 헤는 소녀들) and Kang Sinjae’s The Gift of the Wind (Barameui Seonmul, 바람의 선물), both included in the Hakwon Masterpiece Series.
Choi Jeonghee’s Girls Counting the Stars depicts the process through which an orphaned girl grows into a subject of social motherhood amid familial loss and reconstitution. In this novel, Sunjeong extends beyond private emotion to become a gendered ethical sensibility centered on caring for others and sustaining communal bonds. Through this process, the ideals of postwar reconstruction become attached to the girl protagonist’s envisioned future. By contrast, Kang Sinjae’s The Gift of the Wind, set against the backdrop of the rise of student culture and middle-class sensibilities in the 1960s, presents a form of girlhood shaped through the regulation of friendship, sociability, and romance within the controlled space of the home. Although this appears to represent a new femininity, its core still rests on an ethic that regards care and altruism as women’s responsibilities.
Taken together, the two novels produce the same effect despite taking different paths in handling girls' desires: both relocate those desires into a desexualized register and safely recuperate them into the reproductive circuit of the national community. Although both authors portrayed more complex and at times transgressive female subjects in their fiction for adult readers, their Sunjeong novels for adolescent girls foregrounded normative girlhood instead. This reveals how the educational and moral imperatives of postwar youth literature, along with the expectations attached to the genre itself, worked to reshape the imaginative horizons of women writers. Through this analysis, this article repositions Sunjeong fiction as a key cultural-political site mediating the formation of postwar adolescent subjectivity and the reconfiguration of femininity.