The Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature provides a comprehensive overview of a Korean literary tradition, which is understood as a multifaceted nexus of practices, both homegrown and transnational.
The handbook discusses the perspectives from which modern Korean literature has thus far been defined, analyzing which voices have been enunciated, underappreciated, or completely silenced and how we can enrich our understanding of it. Taking up diverse transnational and interdisciplinary standpoints, this volume aims to encourage readers not to treat modern Korean literature as a self-evident category but to examine it anew as an uncultivated and uncharted space, unearthing its internal chasms and global connections. Divided into five parts, the themes covered include the following:
- Literature and power
- Borders and boundaries
- Rationality in literature and its limits
- Language, ethnicity, and translation
- Korean literature in the changing mediascape.
By introducing new conceptual paradigms to the field of modern Korean literature, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean, East Asian, and world literature alike.
Part 1: The Power of Literature / The Literature of Power
1. Art as Freedom and Power: Kim Tongin and the Political Legacy of "Pure Literature" in Modern Korea, Jin-Kyung Lee
2. Proletarian Reality and Leftist Literature of 1920s and 1930s Colonial Korea, Kimberly Chung
3. The Colonial Frontier: Primitive Accumulation, Migration, and Settler Colonialism in Kando Literature, Travis Workman
4. Decolonizing the Future: Postcolonial Themes in South Korean Science Fiction, Sunyoung Park
5. The Mad Father in the Attic: Torture and the Ethics of Accountability in Post-Authoritarian Korean Fiction, Youngju Ryu
Part 2: Crossing Borders, Redrawing Boundaries
6. In the Shadow of Nation and Empire: Northwestern Writers in Colonial Seoul, Ellie Choi
7. Border Crossings between Decolonization and the Cold War: Rethinking Postliberation Literature, 1945–1950, Ji Young Kim
8. Fracturing Literary Boundaries: Connecting with the Korean Peninsula in Postwar Japan, Jonathan Glade
9. Crossing the Great Divide: Mid-Century Modernism on the Korean Peninsula, Janet Poole
10. Division Literature and Visions for De-Bordering: Ch’oe Inhun, Pak Wanso, and Individuals without Belonging, We Jung Yi
11. South Korean Activist Readers of North Korean Literature, Immanuel J. Kim
Part 3: Rationality in Literature and its Limits: Scientists, Detectives, and Doctors
12. Literary Negotiations with Western Science in Post-Confucian Korea, Jongyon Hwang
13. The Development of Detective Fiction in Colonial Korea, Jooyeon Rhee
14. Curing, But Not Healing, in Pak Wanso’s "During Three Days of that Autumn," Karen Thornber
Part 4: Transnational Archives: Language, Ethnicity, and Translation
15. The Figure of the Translator: Kim Saryang Between Korean and Japanese Literatures, Nayoung Aimee Kwon
16. Zainichi Writers and the Postcoloniality of Modern Korean Literature, Cindi Textor
17. Interracial Romance, Unlawful Marriage: Transpacific Encounters in Early Korean-American Literature, Yoon Sun Yang
18. Autobiography of Others: Dictée’s Counter-Hegemonic Feminism, Kelly Y. Jeong
Part 5: Korean Literature in the Changing Mediascape: Radio, Television, and Print Culture
19. The Sonic Unconscious and the Wartime Radio Novel in Colonial Korea, Jina Kim
20. Make Noise, Not War: Television in Yusin-Era Literature, Evelyn Shih
21. Radicalizing Against Polarities: Poetry and Print Culture in the 1980's Literary Topography, Susan Hwang
Biography
Yoon Sun Yang is associate professor of Korean and comparative literature at Boston University, US. She is the author of From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea (2017).
