A Study Of Hong Tae-Yong's Literature And Its Correlation With Chinese Culture

Hong Tae-Yong, as a pioneer of Korean Northern Learning School in the late 18^th century, who actually didn't leave a good number of works to later generations, has been deeply honored for his progressive ideology, his scientific and practical spirit, as well as his brand new and advanced philosophy on government in the transitional period from Middle Ages to Modern Times. For so many years excessive focus has been given to his ideology and scientific achievement, so that his literary outlook and cultural thought have been ignored to some extent. So this paper draws his literature, cultural and philosophical outlooks which are relatively unfamiliar to readers from his Words of Zhanxuan (two volumes) in Chinese and A Journey to Yan in the Year Yi-Bing in Korean within the writer's reach, to expose the "sparkle" hidden in his works, and tries to appraise his status in Silhak School (also Practical School) objectively, justly, and thoroughly. Besides, through interpreting the foreign images and phantoms in his works, this paper will help readers realize how Korean scholars then understood the literature and culture in China and even in the west, and how the scholars' point of view positively affected social changes in Korea.This paper expounds Hong's literature from four aspects respectively, including his ideology, his poetic theory, the connotation of the images in his literature and the two-way feedback between Hong's and Chinese literature. As known to all, Hong didn't produce any unforgettable literary classics, because literature wasn't his major concern. Nevertheless he presented a profound poetic theory with his own style in his limited posthumous manuscripts. In Preface for Song of Wild East Wind he regarded "song" as one of the ethnic literature forms, and canonized the "folk song", equating "song" with Chinese Poetry. Hong's theory on the nature of poetry "relying on' natural emotion and inspiration" and "valuing thought-provoking while demanding sincerity" bore the stamp of Yuan Mei, a Chinese poetic theorist in Qing Dynasty. Different from Yuan Mei who focused on "disposition", Hong put more attention on "emotion", holding that the natural "emotion" was the nature of poetry. This paper also discusses Hong's view on literary criticism from aspects such as literary form and style, and regards A Journey to Yan in Korean and Memoirs on Meeting Friends in plain language as the best representation of his literary outlook, which is known as "encouraging new ideas against simply imitating the ancients" and "revealing true emotion against ornate style". Finally this paper sums up his thoughts on creation from content, motivation and characteristics, and comes to the conclusion that the content and style he stressed was "pursuing authenticity against subjective emotion", the motivation was "amusing and meanwhile instructing", while his purpose to create derived from a leisurely and carefree mood.The paper only refers to Hong's philosophical, learning and social outlooks on the principle of concision and practice, for the whole system of Hong's thoughts is quite complicated. Hong's main thoughts can be summarized as follow. 1) the...