London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

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Selected publications

A look back at our 2020 reading diary

Like many readers, we started the year with good intention of blitzing through the pile of new titles that were promised for the coming months, as well as making inroads into the backlog. And we genuinely got off to a good start with a string of fun K-thrillers, some of them new, some not: The … [Read More]

Kyung Hyun Kim’s Virtual Hallyu: more approachable than Remasculinization, but still tough going

Kyung Hyun Kim: Virtual Hallyu — Korean Cinema of the Global Era Duke University Press Books, 2011. 280pp On Planet Deleuze, a world in a parallel universe inhabited by hyper-intelligent philosophers, psychoanalysts and cultural studies scholars, Kyung Hyun Kim’s second book on Korean film will be voraciously devoured, as no doubt his previous book was. … [Read More]

Yuasa Katsuei: a Japanese colonial novelist

Yuasa Katsuei: Two Japanese Colonial Novels Kannani (1934), Document of Flames (1935). Translated by Mark Driscoll, Duke University Press (2005) Yuasa Katsuei was born in Japan in 1910 and before his second birthday moved to Korea where his father worked in the colonial police force. He went to university in Tokyo from 1929, before returning … [Read More]

Fetishes, Phalluses and Mini-skirts – a review of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema

Kyung Hyun Kim: The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema Duke University Press, 2004 This book is for a restricted academic readership only. I can empathise with the feeling of inadequacy, crisis and male lack which, according to Kim, plagues the majority of protagonists in Korean film (though there is a difference between me and them, namely … [Read More]