1st Edition

Modern Korea and Its Others Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity

By Vladimir Tikhonov Copyright 2016
244 Pages
by Routledge

238 Pages
by Routledge

238 Pages
by Routledge

The period spanning the 1880s to 1945 was a crucially important formative time for Korea, during which understandings of modernity were largely shaped by the images of Korea’s neighbours to the east, west and north. China, Japan and Russia represented at some moments modern threats, but also denoted a range of alternative modernity possibilities, and ultimately provided a model for Korea’s... Read more

Introduction Part I: Russia – an Oriental Occident? 1. Russia as a Threat and a Hope in Korean Intellectual Life, 1880s to 1945 2. The Joys of Utopia, the Sorrows of Exile: Russia, Russian and the USSR in Korean Colonial-Period Literature Part II: China – Centre-turned-Periphery-turned Hope for the Future 3. The Other to learn from at a Distance: China in the pre-1910 Modern Korean Press 4. Aliens in our Midst and the Hope for the Future: the Image of China and Chinese in 1910s-30s’ Korea Part III: Japan – Model and Conqueror, eternally Alien? 5. To Learn from Japan in Order to Overcome it: Japan as the Significant Other in the Korean Intellectual Life of the 1900s-1920s 6. The Assimilation which Never Happened: Korean-Japanese Mixed Marriages in Colonial Korea 7. Conclusion

Biography

Vladimir Tikhonov is a professor of Korean and East Asian studies at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, Norway. He recently published Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: the Beginnings (2010).

"... this book is highly readable, providing a thorough and textured intellectual history, with due consideration of historical context always at the forefront of the author’s concerns. It also offers an enlightening introduction to both well-known and more obscure authors and their works. These are some of the many qualities that make this book highly recommended."

Kyung Moon Hwang, University of Southern California, Pacific Affairs