The Sower (Tanemakuhito) : Its Reception and Influence in Korea

韓国における日本近代文学運動の評価考察 : 『種まく人』の評価

The Sower (Tanemakuhito) : Its Reception and Influence in Korea

Creators Soo-kyung YI

Sower is a magazine of culture and art, first published in Akita in northern Japan in 1921, which attempted under difficult conditions of Japan's early modernity to connect Japan to the world by publishing information on world-wide problems, especially by introducing the perspective of the Third International (based in Moscow). Its influence was felt not only in Japan but in neighbouring Korea. Kim Kijin, who studied in Tokyo between 1920 and 1923, is one Korean who felt this influence. Though born into the privileged classes, Kim was a literary figure and critic who was conscious of his social responsibility to the masses and committed himself to proletarian literature. He became the central figure in the Korean proletarian literature movement and founder of KAPF (Korean Artists' Proletarian Federation), which exercised considerable social and literary influence over a period of ten years (1925-1935). The formative influences on Kim's thought coming from the (French) Clarte movement and Henri Barbusse via The Sower have been the subject of much discussion in Korean academic and scientific circles, but no detailed attention has ever been paid to the character of The Sower. This paper is designed to offer for the first time a detailed scientific study of The Sower, its reception and influence in Korea.

[ISSN]1342-7148