Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi’s transmedia analyses unearth people’s experiences of “wormification”—traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature
The Korean War Novel: Rewriting History from the Civil War to the Post-Cold War
Uncovers how historical novels rewrite the history of the Korean War Revisits the Korean War and the Korean War novels from a post-Cold War perspective of decolonisation Examines the dual role of East Asians as both victims and agents of the Cold War Recovers previously hidden dimensions of the conflict, including its framing as a … [Read More]
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea
Mediating Gender in Post-Authoritarian South Korea focuses on the relationship between media representation and gender politics in South Korea. Its chapters feature notable voices of South Korea’s burgeoning sphere of gender critique enabled by social media, doing what no other academic volume has yet accomplished in the sphere of Anglophone studies on this topic. Seeking … [Read More]
Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea
When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era. Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding … [Read More]
Indeterminate Inflorescence
“Poetry is the restoration of the whole through details. Think of it as making a sketch of a face only briefly seen. Just as one puts together a shattered skull or an earthenware pot, poetry is the creation of the pieces that go in the spots where the original pieces are missing.” Indeterminate Inflorescence is a … [Read More]
Literature and Cultural Identity during the Korean War: Comparing North and South Korean Writing
Through an in-depth analysis of wartime essays and literary works, Literature and Cultural Identity during the Korean War considers the similarities and differences in the way that writers from both North and South Korea perceived and experienced the conflict. In this book, Jerôme de Wit examines the social impact of major themes in the output … [Read More]
Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture: Transmedia Storytelling, Digital Platforms, and Genres
Webtoons are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe in recent years, especially among youth. Webtoons are a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers … [Read More]
Minor Salvage: The Korean War and Korean American Life Writings
The Korean War, often invoked in American culture as “the forgotten war,” was fought between 1950 and 1953 and ended with an infamous stalemate and the construction of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone. Millions of Korean civilians and refugees were left behind, some of whom would go onto live in the United States. Minor Salvage … [Read More]
The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature
The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature consists of 35 chapters written by leaders in the field, who explore significant topics and who have pioneered innovative approaches. The collection highlights the most dynamic current scholarship on Korean literature, presenting rigorous literary analysis, interdisciplinary methodologies, and transregional thinking so as to provide a valuable and inspiring resource for researchers … [Read More]
A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature: The Birth of Oppa
A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature: The Birth of Oppa examines the cultural and social impact of Japanese colonialism and modernity on the wider aspects of everyday life in Korea. Selected as an outstanding work in 2004 by the National Academy of Sciences in South Korea, is by any measure a remarkable work. Lee considers … [Read More]
On Translating Modern Korean Poetry
From the publisher’s website: On Translating Modern Korean Poetry is a research monograph exploring the intricacies and complexities of translating modern Korean poetry. This monograph highlights the difficulties entailed in translating Korean poetry, due to the lexical, structural, social, expressive and attitudinal levels with which the translator must be engaged. Featuring all-new translations, this book explores … [Read More]
Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions
There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account … [Read More]
Language and Truth in North Korea
From the publisher’s website: In this innovative and persuasive volume, Sonia Ryang offers new ways to think about North Korea and how truth emerges over decades from within a dominant discourse. It explores four discrete yet mutually related domains of discourse: North Korea’s literary purge of the 1950s–1960s; its state-initiated linguistic reforms of the 1960s–1980s; … [Read More]
South Korea’s Webtooniverse and the Digital Comic Revolution
From the publisher’s website: This book investigates the meteoric rise of mobile webtoons – also known as webcomics – and the dynamic relationships between serialised content, artists, agencies, platforms and applications, as well as the global readership associated with them. It offers an engaging discussion of webtoons themselves, and what makes this new media form … [Read More]
Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday
From the publisher’s website: The lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. These vast works unfold genealogically, tracing the lives of several generations. New storylines, often written by different authors, follow the lives of the descendants of the original protagonists, offering encyclopedic accounts of domestic life cycles and … [Read More]
The History of Modern Korean Fiction (1890-1945): The Topography of Literary Systems and Form
From the publisher’s website: Young Min Kim – Translated by Rachel Min Park – Introduction by Theodore Jun Yoo – Afterword by Jooyeon Rhee This book explores the history of modern Korean literature from a sociocultural perspective. Rather than focusing solely on specific authors and their works, Young Min Kim argues that the development of … [Read More]