From the publisher’s website: This book vividly traces the genealogy of modern womanhood in the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century, during Korea’s colonization by Japan. Hyaeweol Choi shows that what it meant to be a “modern” Korean woman was deeply bound up in such diverse themes as Korean … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 72)
Admonitions on Governing the People: Manual for All Administrators
From the publisher’s website: This is the first English translation of one of Korea’s most celebrated historical works, a pre-modern classic so well known to Koreans that it has inspired contemporary literature and television. Written in 1821 by Chong Yagyong (Tasan), Admonitions on Governing the People (Mongmin simso) is a detailed manual for district magistrates on how … [Read More]
The Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea, 1910–1945: A New Perspective
From the publisher’s website: The Japanese Colonial Legacy in Korea reexamines Japan’s policies in Korea from 1910 to 1945. The authors contend that Japan’s policies were moderate considering the magnitude of the colonial endeavor and were proportional when compared to the imperialist practices of Western nations. Drawing on recent scholarship, this study effectively contributes to the … [Read More]
A Bird in Flight Leaves No Trace: The Zen Teaching of Huangbo with a Modern Commentary
From the publisher’s website: The message of the Tang-dynasty Zen text in this volume seems simple: to gain enlightenment, stop thinking there is something you need to practice. For the Chinese master Huangbo Xiyun (d. 850), the mind is enlightenment itself if we can only let go of our normal way of thinking. The celebrated … [Read More]
Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in Colonial Korea
From the publisher’s website: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Rules of the House offers a dynamic revisionist account of the Japanese colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945) by examining the roles of women in the civil courts. Challenging … [Read More]
Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea
From the publisher’s website: The division of Korea in August 1945 was one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the twentieth century. Despite the enormous impact this split has had on international relations from the Cold War to the present, comparatively little has been done to explain the decision. In Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, … [Read More]
Writing Women in Korea: Translation and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century
From the publisher’s website: Writing Women in Korea explores the connections among translation, new forms of writing, and new representations of women in Korea from the early 1900s to the late 1930s. It examines shifts in the way translators handled material pertaining to women, the work of women translators of the time, and the relationship between … [Read More]
From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation in Modern Korea
From the publisher’s website: At the start of the twentieth century, the Korean Buddhist tradition was arguably at the lowest point in its 1,500-year history in the peninsula. Discriminatory policies and punitive measures imposed on the monastic community during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) had severely weakened Buddhist institutions. Prior to 1895, monastics were prohibited by … [Read More]
Ask a Korean Dude: An Authoritative and Irreverent Guide to the Korea Experience
From the publisher’s website: Korea: A country where tradition and rapid modernization meet in a dynamic dichotomy full of seemingly incongruous, yet somehow germane ethnic charms. It is these very elements that truly set Korea apart from its Asian colleagues as a bombastically inclined but strangely endearing little country. This book is a collection of … [Read More]
Elusive Belonging: Marriage Immigrants and “Multiculturalism” in Rural South Korea
From the publisher’s website: Elusive Belonging examines the post-migration experiences of Filipina marriage immigrants in rural South Korea. Marriage migration—crossing national borders for marriage—has attracted significant public and scholarly attention, especially in new destination countries, which grapple with how to integrate marriage migrants and their children and what that integration means for citizenship boundaries and a … [Read More]
Efficacious Underworld: The Evolution of Ten Kings Paintings in Medieval China and Korea
From the publisher’s website: The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, … [Read More]
The Making of the First Korean President: Syngman Rhee’s Quest for Independence
From the publisher’s website: The only full-scale history of Syngman Rhee’s (1875–1965) early career in English was published nearly six decades ago. Now, in The Making of the First Korean President, Young Ick Lew uncovers little-known aspects of Rhee’s leadership roles prior to 1948, when he became the Republic of Korea’s first president. In this richly illustrated … [Read More]
Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea
From the publisher’s website: Known as Asia’s “evangelical superpower,” South Korea today has some of the largest and most dynamic churches in the world and is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries it dispatches abroad. Understanding its evangelicalism is crucial to grasping the course of its modernization, the rise of … [Read More]
Aspiring to Enlightenment: Pure Land Buddhism in Silla Korea
From the publisher’s website: Centered on the practice of seeking rebirth in the Pure Land paradise Sukhāvatī, the Amitābha cult has been the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea since the middle of the Silla period (ca. 300–935). In Aspiring to Enlightenment, Richard McBride combines analyses of scriptural, exegetical, hagiographical, epigraphical, art historical, and literary materials to … [Read More]
Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea
Although modernization in Korea started more than a century later than in the West, it has worked as a prominent ideology throughout the past century—in particular it has brought radical changes in Korean architecture and cities. Traditional structures and ways of life have been thoroughly uprooted in modernity’s continuous negation of the past. This book … [Read More]
Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea
From the publisher’s website: Why and how did Korean religious groups respond to growing rural poverty, social dislocation, and the corrosion of culture caused by forces of modernization under strict Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945)? Questions about religion’s relationship and response to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization lie at the heart of understanding the intersection between … [Read More]