"La inundación" (Hongsu) y "La caligrafía" (Seohwa) representan la quintaesencia de la "literatura campesina" y describen la realidad de las dificultades del campo a través de la perspectiva proletaria. Siendo uno de los escritores destacados de la literatura del proletariado, Ri Ki-yong, exploró las vidas miserables de los campesinos explotados por los terratenientes y oprimidos por el capitalismo colonial. Hometown (Gohyang), like Lee Gwangsu's Dust (Heuk) and Shim Hun's The Evergreen (Sangnoksu), focuses on intellectuals who return to their hometown and devote their lives to the project of enlightening oppressed peasants. His views are perfected in his landmark novel Hometown (Gohyang), first serialized in The Chosun Ilbo. His works identify the extremely poor peasantry, equipped with anti-imperialist perspective through their firsthand experiences with oppression, as the suitable comrade to the proletariat in class struggles. While the debate concerning peasant literature at the time focused on defining the relationship between peasants and the urban proletariat, Ri Ki-yong proposed that the peasants, under the colonial capitalism, is no longer a unified class. Seohwa, in particular, makes a keen observation of the dual nature of peasants as part of proletarian class as well as propertied class.
Flood (Hongsu) and Rat Fire (Seohwa) represent quintessential “peasant literature” and describe the reality of rural hardships through the proletarian perspective. One of the leading writers to emerge from the proletarian literature camp, Ri Ki-yong explored miserable lives of peasants exploited by their landlords and oppressed by colonial capitalism.