Abstract

his paper is to look into the works of Novelist Cheong, Bi-seok and their historical meanings, focusing on his full-length and romance novels. Full-length romance novels and those of manners published in the 1940s and 50s when Cheong was in his prime and was working relentlessly make up the core of his works. He wrote profusely during these periods, for example, releasing 28 separate volumes, most of them were serial stories in the newspapers. That is, his full-length romance novels and those of manners enjoyed enormous successes among newspaper readers in the 1950s and were estimated the most popular ones. They represented interests, world perception and attitudes of middle class middle aged men who lived in the cities during the 1950s as well as the world of the novelist's works. Cheong, Bi-seok's full-length novels could be divided into five periods and they reveal explicitly more and more libido and greed and the number of characters pursuing their desires blindly grows bigger as time goes by. These works assume that desires for money, power and sex are the most important human nature no matter what one's integrity is, and show plainly and subtlely that this world is a place where human beings who run for their desires fight and deal force with force. These novels clearly announce the arrival of the world which is being carried away by desires and moves rapidly and practically, getting rid of self-examination and thinking. Such unprecedented view on human beings and world perception catch precisely modern capitalistic society and human beings which is not achieved by any other novel or novelist. However, these works acknowledge personal freedom which is the basic premise of modernity and democracy but ignores equality and human rights completely. In this regard, his works lost their appeal and declined after the April 19th revolution in 1960 when the political awareness was hightened by the new generation.