earticle

영어

This study seeks the origin and its early conditions of the Korean love tragic novels from the narrative of the Three Nation Era and also investigates aesthetic features of the early narrative. In particular, based on existing researches of hero tragic drama, this study searches for distinctive logics and aesthetic bases that love tragic drama has. For this, fundamental and universal characteristics of love are first investigated and then reasons for what makes an individual frustration of love turn out tragic are sought, and from this, some frames that help to understand and classify love tragic drama are established. Love is a desire deeply rooted in the nature of all the human beings and the universality of the desire makes the value of love universal. For this reason, the frustration of the main character who pursues love takes the look of tragedy. Besides, love requires at least two persons for its development and in that sense, relationship is emphasized and especially, the loved one (a lover) has the absolute importance for the main character. From such aspects, early love narrative is largely classified into three types of female sacrifice, male sacrifice and female-male sacrifice. In the case of female sacrifice type, the ideology of patriarch tends to determine the degree of its aesthetic chastity, resulting in the two sub-categories of ideology-oriented sacrifice and temper-oriented one. For male sacrifice, there are in fact some differences, but male's pure love itself matters. And in the case of female-male sacrifice, a force that forcefully causes the failure of love is given not by the lovers but by outside and therefore, a proportional relation is made between the degree of resistance against this force (destiny) and the strength of tragedy a novel has. This is because the value of love will be heightened as the lovers resist their destiny and try to keep their love. The novels of female-male sacrifice type show more refined contents than those of ones featuring a unilateral love and its consequent strong frustration. And two-involving love provides a more stable narrative structure, when compared with unrequited love. Main characters in novels generally have a positive will to go against all the odds to keep their love. The study interprets this as the amalgamation of the archetype-thought of the Orient about the communication and circulation of all things and regional shamanism- thought. In addition, most novels dealing with female-male sacrifice type take an exclusive love only available to a pair of lovers. Such attitude seeking pure love for each other is typical for the early narrative and is a consistent tradition of Korean love tragic drama as well.