Abstract

This study aimed at defining <Jekuk Sinmun>’s identity as modern mass media, considering its romantic reappearance aspect and its meaning according to change in World-consciousness, focusing on 9 new-style novels that were included in <Jekuk Sinmun>. The era of the great han empire was the period that tried to find main agents of civilization and the method in social imagination which tried to build a modern Nation State. Due to the protectorate Treaty between Korea and Japan concluded in 1905 and the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1907, <Jekuk Sinmun> developed a new method to enlighten the public in a novel while keeping to the characteristic of strenuous efforts that was based on the improvement of a custom and ability fostering theory, which Our goal could no longer promote to build a modern Nation State. Therefore, <Jekuk Sinmun> recalled ‘the ethos of Korean(죠션혼)’ through leading article, at the same moment; it asked modern individual(私人) for coming into the world.As such editorial reasonable argument was reproduced in a novel, it enlarged sympathy to the public. While a novel improved Korean theatrical practice, especially, and could give an impetus to institutionalization of daily life, it tried to produce the mechanism of pro-Americal and expanded for restoring the great main agent. As the result, while a novel in <Jekuk Sinmun> wrote modern sense, ethics, value and orientation process to institutionalization of daily life in everyday world, it played a role as creating modern main subject, constructing imaginative common sense and recalled the great main agent. The novel’s project of enlightenment, however, was convergent institutionalization of daily life in value neutral, and could not give an impetus to political reform that was able to cope with flexibly weak-to-the-wall kind of international dynamics.