A charming ode to the lost art of connecting through the handwritten letter, from the owner of the beloved Seoul stationery shop Geulwoll Juhee Moon once doubted whether handwritten letters had a place in our ultra-fast-paced world, but the runaway success of her stationery shop Geulwoll, established in 2019, quickly became known as a tranquil … [Read More]
Booklist: Non-Fiction
Vestiges of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea: A Translation of the Samguk yusa [forthcoming]
Vestiges of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea (Samguk yusa) is the first annotated English translation of one of the most important premodern Korean historical texts. One of only two surviving works on the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668) and Greater Silla (668–936), the Samguk yusa is a rich collection of historical, supernatural, and mythical stories, including one of … [Read More]
Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era [forthcoming]
Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era explores how histories, industry structures, and politics interact in the platformization of the Korean Wave. Dal Yong Jin argues that while much research centers on the Korean culture takeover and the dominance of Korean products on premier global media platforms, Korean cultural industries also experience reshaping and … [Read More]
The Korean Cinema Book [forthcoming]
Publisher description: The volume provides the first detailed and authoritative overview of Korean cinema history, and in so doing develops new historical and critical understandings of Korean cinema from the period of Japanese colonial rule to the present day, with two very different cinematic traditions in this divided peninsula. The contributed chapters approach the subject … [Read More]
The Wailing [forthcoming]
Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing (2016) has been acclaimed as one of the very best horror films of recent years. In The Wailing, a mysterious illness turns its rural victims into comatose perpetrators of familicide. In the fog of an unknown spiritual war, police officer Jong-goo is helpless as his community fragments and suspicions turn to a mysterious Japanese … [Read More]
Every Moment Was You: Notes on Loving and Parting [forthcoming]
The Korean best-selling title since 2018 and the winner of the 2018 YES 24 Book of the Year Award, that encourages us to celebrate our ordinary life and love in every moment, Every Moment Was You, is finally available in English! ✨ Captured the hearts of more than 500,000 readers in South Korea. ✨ As … [Read More]
Forever Girls: Necro-cinematics and South Korean Girlhood [forthcoming]
Forever Girls explores girlhood manifest in contemporary South Korean cinema within the conflicting socio-political forces that shaped the nation: coloniality, postcolonial and postwar traumas, modernity, and democracy. Author Jinhee Choi reorients the direction of current scholarship on contemporary South Korean cinema from patriarchy, masculinity and violence, to instead consider girls as a social imaginary. Drawing on … [Read More]
The Emplantation of Catholicism in Pre-modern Korea: Texts, Teachings and Gender Relations [forthcoming]
Tracing the development of Catholic ideas in Japan and China during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, this book provides an overview of the early emplantation of Catholicism in East Asia and the evolution of the missionary strategy. Kevin Cawley recreates the tumultuous period for gender relations and explores interreligious interactions between Confucians and … [Read More]
Critically Capitalist: The Spirit of Asset Capitalism in South Korea
An ethnography of South Korea’s lay investors and aspiring millionaires that demonstrates how South Korea’s capitalism thrives on its critiques. Critically Capitalist presents an ethnography of South Korea’s asset seekers, including amateur stock investors, real estate enthusiasts, and money coaches, to demonstrate how financialized asset capitalism is sustained. As they hunt for profit margins, rent, and … [Read More]
Readings of the Gateless Barrier
The Gateless Barrier is one of the most cherished yet also one of the most enigmatic Chan or Zen texts of East Asian Buddhism. Compiled by the Chinese Chan master Wumen Huikai in 1228, it contains forty-eight Zen stories of spiritual awakening called “public cases” or gong’ans (known as kōans in Japanese and kongans in Korean). This book presents a new English translation … [Read More]
Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea
Anyone genuinely curious about what makes South Korean pop culture tick should look no further than Gangnam. Celebrated in a song by an unlikely K-pop superstar named Psy in 2012, Gangnam is the epicenter of Hallyu, the Korean Wave. It is an exclusive zone of privilege and wealth that has lured pop culture industries since the 1980s … [Read More]
Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics
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]
From Eternity to Eternity: Memoirs of a Korean Buddhist Nun
From Eternity to Eternity is the story of Bulpil Sunim, arguably the most respected female Seon (Zen) master in Korea. Written with candor and an unpretentious sense of humor, her memoir provides both a fascinating record of her life and a deeply accessible window into Buddhist thought and spirituality. Describing and reflecting on her own experience … [Read More]
Lapwing: The Life Of Bishop Richard Rutt
Richard Rutt led an extraordinary life. He was Bishop of Daejeon in South Korea from 1968 – 1974 and first moved to South Korea to work as a priest a year after the end of the Korean War, in 1954. After he and his wife, Joan, returned to the UK in 1974, he served as … [Read More]
Monks and Literati: The Transformation of Buddhism in Late Chosŏn Korea
Scholars have long debated the relationship between Buddhist monks and Confucian literati during the late Chosŏn (1700–1850), when the Korean state adopted anti-Buddhist policies. On the one hand, it is understood that literati openly displayed hostility toward monks and engineered their persecution; on the other, they were known to have privately supported Buddhism, helping the … [Read More]
The Bloomsbury Handbook of North Korean Cinema
This first handbook on North Korean cinema contests the assumption that North Korean film is “unwatchable,” in terms of both quality and accessibility, refusing to reduce North Korean cinema to political propaganda and focusing on its aesthetic forms and cultural meanings. Since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) has … [Read More]