Hahn Moo-Sook’s fiction often embraces purity through literature. While many Korean writers enveloped in nihilism or existentialism, Hahn Moo-Sook made her mark by warmly rendering human joys rather than engaging in cynical pessimism. Her themes varied from universal concerns including love and suffering to issues specific to the Korean context, including her portrayal of the … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 122)
A Trip Through the Mirror
The author Joo-Young Kim is well known as a novelist who writes about common people’s joys and sorrows. Graduating from the Sorabol Art College majoring in creative writing, he made his literary debut with Resting Stage, which won the New Writer’s Award from Monthly Literature. Kim is known as a writer who reproduces historical periods … [Read More]
Chocolate Friend and Other Stories
With vivid imagery, inventive writing style and keen perception, Han Malsook captures the multicasted interiority of alienated human beings, in particular, the psychology of contemporary women in the postwar setting. Her major work, “A Precipice of Myth” (Sinhwaui danae, 1960) utilizes existentialist perspective to probe the damaged psychology of a woman whose denial of conventional … [Read More]
Encounter
This historical novel, Encounter (만남), by Hahn Moo-Sook, one of Asia’s most honored writers, is a story of the resilience in the Korean spirit. It is told through the experiences of Tasan, a high-ranking official and foremost Neo-Confucian scholar at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because of Tasan’s fascination with Western learning, then synonymous … [Read More]
Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
Often depicted as one of the world’s most strictly isolationist and relentlessly authoritarian regimes, North Korea has remained terra incognita to foreign researchers as a site for anthropological fieldwork. Given the difficulty of gaining access to the country and its people, is it possible to examine the cultural logic and social dynamics of the Democratic … [Read More]
Understanding Korean Literature
This study examines the development and characteristics of various historical and contemporary genres of Korean literature. It presents explanations on the development of Korean literacy and offers a history of literary criticism, traditional and modern, giving the discussion an historical context. [Read More]
A History of Korean Literature
This comprehensive narrative history of Korean literature provides essential information for scholars and students as well as others. Combining history and criticism, the study reflects the latest scholarship and includes an account of the development of all genres. In 25 chapters, it covers twentieth-century poetry, fiction by women, and the literature of North Korea. It … [Read More]
Writers of the Winter Republic: Literature and Resistance in Park Chung Hee’s Korea
In 1975, a young high school teacher took the stage at a prayer meeting in a southwestern Korean city to recite a poem called The Winter Republic. The poem became an anthem against the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee and his successors; the poet, however, soon found himself in court and then in prison … [Read More]
An Anthology of Traditional Korean Literature
This revised, expanded anthology, compiled and edited by pioneering scholar and translator Peter H. Lee, offers a representative selection of traditional Korean literature. Its rich and diverse selections, covering all genres and forms written in classical (literary) Chinese and the vernacular Korean language, were chosen for both their literary merit and socio-historical engagement with their … [Read More]
Between Heaven and Earth
“Between Heaven and Earth”, the winner of the Yi Sang Literature Prize in 1996, is about a man, who, on his way to pay a visit of condolence, comes across a woman whose face is covered with the cold shadow of death. His memory of his own life having been saved by the sacrifice of … [Read More]
House of Idols
No synopsis available [Read More]
In the Depths
The reading public of Korea was amazed when a reclusive housewife Moo-Sook Hahn “whisked away” the first prize in a contest for novel writing sponsored by a literary magazine in the early 1940’s with A Woman with a Lantern. Ever since, novelist Hahn received one literary prize or award after another including the Freedom Literature Award … [Read More]
The Wings
The three stories gathered in this volume display Yi Sang’s inventive manipulation of autobiographical elements, a method which expands his intensely private narratives into broader meditations on love, life, and death. “The Wings,” a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny … [Read More]
The Camellias
Includes three stories: The Camellias The Scorching Heat A Wanderer in the Valleys [Read More]
Trap of History: Understanding Korean Short Stories
Excerpt from Questia: Culture is an emblem of a people’s self-recognition in their own world and of their achievement of freedom in it. It is a people’s cumulative reception and negation of the world in their history — negation in the Hegelian sense, that is, the changing of the world in accord with one’s own … [Read More]