earticle

영어

The focus in this paper lies in the link between the Hŭmŭm sinsŏ published by the Confucian jurist Chŏng Yagyong(1762-1836) in the late Chosŏn period and the Ming gong'an collection Lianming gong'an produced by the late Ming publisher Yu Xiangdou. It seems surprising that the author of the Hŭmŭm sinsŏ showed much interest in such a Chinese crime story collection published in commercial edition, and even introduced 19 stories of the collection in his book specializing in law and legal cases. However, I think that the relationship between the Hŭmŭm sinsŏ and the gong'an collection illustrates what Confucian legal culture was like. It seems remarkable that the use of gong'an stories as law cases in the Hŭmŭm sinsŏ illustrates a thin line between law and literature, between gong'an as legal writing and gong'an as crime fiction. In particular, the author never hesitated to include fantastic cases solved by supernatural power in his book, even though he was clearly aware that they were fictitious. I found the reason from the fact that Confucian justice recognized the close link between law and rhetoric, between law and literature. Legal writing in the traditional justice system in which Confucian morality played a more significant role as a standard of legal reasoning and judgement than legal statutes did not mean the full description of “facts,” but a kind of “careful yet literary” reconstruction of “truth.” Legal storytelling aimed at persuading the audience including the judge by means of rhetoric and literary trope. In that sense, “thinking with cases” seemed inevitable in the Confucian justice system which centered on both circumstances and principle, that is, qing and li, rather than solely on law.