From the publisher’s website: The notion of the individual was initially translated into Korean near the end of the nineteenth century and took root during the early years of Japanese colonial influence. Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were prototypically female figures appearing in the early colonial domestic novel—a genre … [Read More]
Booklist: Literature (page 4)
The History of Korean Literature: From Ancient Times to the Late Nineteenth Century
An easy to read, extensive exploration of premodern Korean literature. The work covers the beginning of Korean literature until the end of the nineteenth century and would be ideal for students in Korean or Asian literature classes. [Read More]
Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature
From the publisher’s website: Translation’s Forgotten History investigates the meanings and functions that translation generated for modern national literatures during their formative period and reconsiders literature as part of a dynamic translational process of negotiating foreign values. By examining the triadic literary and cultural relations among Russia, Japan, and colonial Korea and revealing a shared sensibility … [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]
Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan
From the publisher’s website: In Intimate Empire Nayoung Aimee Kwon examines intimate cultural encounters between Korea and Japan during the colonial era and their postcolonial disavowal. After the Japanese empire’s collapse in 1945, new nation-centered histories in Korea and Japan actively erased these once ubiquitous cultural interactions that neither side wanted to remember. Kwon reconsiders these imperial … [Read More]
The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist Culture in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
From the publisher’s website: Socialist doctrines had an important influence on Korean writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. From the 1910s through the 1940s, a veritable wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the cultural scene with differing agendas as well as shared demands for equality and social justice. In The … [Read More]
When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea
Publisher’s description: Taking a panoramic view of Korea’s dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, When the Future Disappears locates the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in … [Read More]
Key Papers on Korea: Essays Celebrating 25 Years of the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, University of London
Key Papers on Korea is a commemorative collection of papers celebrating 25 years of the Centre of Korean Studies (CKS), SOAS, University of London that have been written by senior academics and emerging scholars. The subjects covered in this collection reflect the different research interests and different strengths of the CKS and include historical perceptions of … [Read More]
Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s
From the publisher’s website: This book examines the role of translation—the rendering of texts and ideas from one language to another, as both act and trope—in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse between the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and the passing of the colonial generation … [Read More]
The Story of Traditional Korean Literature
In this book, renowned Korean studies scholar Peter H. Lee casts light on important works previously undervalued or suppressed in Korean literary history. He illuminates oral-derived texts as Koryo love songs, p’ansori, and shamanist narrative songs which were composed in the mind, retained in the memory, sung to audiences, and heard but not read, as well … [Read More]
The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea
From the publisher’s website: The contentious relationship between modernism and realism has powerfully influenced literary history throughout the twentieth century and into the present. In 1930s Korea, at a formative moment in these debates, a “crisis of representation” stemming from the loss of faith in language as a vehicle of meaningful reference to the world … [Read More]
Engraving Virtue: The Printing History of a Premodern Korean Moral Primer
In Engraving Virtue, Young Kyun Oh investigates the publishing history of the Samgang Haengsil-to (Illustrated Guide to the Three Relations), a moral primer of Chosŏn (1392–1910), and traces the ways in which woodblock printed books contributed to shaping premodern Korea. Originally conceived by the court as a book with which to instill in its society Confucian ethics … [Read More]
Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era
From the publisher’s website: This volume contains translations — many appearing for the first time in the English language — of major literary, critical, and historical essays from the colonial period (1910–1945) in Korea. Considered representative of the debates among and between Korean and Japanese thinkers of the colonial period, these texts shed light on … [Read More]
Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea
From the publisher’s website: As millions of women and girls left country towns to generate Korea’s manufacturing boom, the factory girl emerged as an archetypal figure in twentieth-century popular culture. This book explores the factory girl in Korean literature from the 1920s to the 1990s, showing the complex ways in which she has embodied the … [Read More]
Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom’s Frontier
Publisher description: Korean writers and filmmakers crossed literary and visual cultures in multilayered ways under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). Taking advantage of new modes and media that emerged in the early twentieth century, these artists sought subtle strategies for representing the realities of colonialism and global modernity. Theodore Hughes begins by unpacking the relations among … [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]