Daily Life in North Korean Society After the Armistice Regime: The Reality of ‘Postwar Recovery’ and the People in North Korea’s ‘Literature and Arts’

Abstract

This article aims to examine the reality and people of post-war restoration reflected in everyday life in North Korean society aer the Armistice Regime, especially in literature and art. At the moment of armistice, North Korean people expressed their joy of being freed from the fear of bombing. North Korean society turned the war into a memory of victory and started rebuilding industrial facilities in factories, rural areas, and cities in the restored daily life. In this reality, Newspapers and popular culture created war heroes, industrial heroes, and labor heroes to encourage political slogans and propaganda, but literature and the arts were given a role to educate communist human beings in addition to propaganda and agitation. is article noted that the two novels representing the “post-war recovery period” in North Korean literature history used politics and slogans as surface narratives, and reproduced characters and sub-subjects with the concrete image of the living world and feminine values in the reality.