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Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950) was one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature. When the serialization of Mujông (The Heartless) began in 1917, it was an immediate sensation, and it occupies a prominent place in the Korean literary canon. The Heartless is the story of a love triangle among three youths during the Japanese occupation. Yi Hyông-sik is a young man in his mid-twenties who is teaching English at a middle school in Seoul. Brilliant but also shy and indecisive, he is torn between two women. Kim Sôn-hyông is from a wealthy Christian family; she has just graduated from a modern, Western-style school and is planning on continuing her studies in the United States. Pak Yông-ch'ae is a musically gifted young woman who was raised in a traditional Confucian manner; due to family misfortune, she has become a kisaeng but remains devoted to Hyông-sik whom she knew as a child. The Heartless goes beyond the level of romantic melodrama and uses these characters to depict Korea's struggles with modern culture and national identity.A long critical introduction discusses Yi Kwang-su's life and work from his birth in 1892 to the publication of his first novel The Heartless in 1917. It contains in-depth analyses of the novel, Yi Kwang-su's literary theory, and early short stories.
"Outlining the major developments, characteristics, genres, and figures of the Korean literary tradition from earliest times into the new millennium, this volume includes examples, in English translation, of each of the genres and works by several of the major figures discussed in the text, as well as suggestions for further reading"--
The history of Korea in the twentieth century has been a grim succession of oppressions, humiliations, and betrayals. Yet through it all, modern Korean writers have been able not only to find their own distinctive voices but to forge a national literature that speaks eloquently of the survival of the human spirit in times of crisis. This anthology includes the finest translations available of representative works in all the major genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and drama. Readers will gain a clear sense of the development of twentieth-century Korean literature and a vivid impression of the resilience, strength, and tenacity of modern Korean writers.
Readings in Modern Korean Literature provides advanced students (those with at least four years of college-level training in Korean) with materials that will help them understand and appreciate modern Korean literary traditions as well as challenge them to use their Korean-language competence to the fullest extent. It offers the student a wide range of literary writing, including three different genres of poetry, short stories, and essays. Each piece is accompanied by a vocabulary glossary and notes, explanations of socio-cultural details, an introduction to the author, and a translation. The textbook is distinguished by a variety of exercises designed to enhance students’ proficiency in referential reading, writing, and comprehension skills.
The sixth book in Kegan Paul International's "Korean Culture Series", this volume contains thirty stories that have been selected on the basis of historical interest and literary worth, each representing a monumental moment in the history of Korean Literature. The ten stories in the first part share the common theme of the Korean experience of the confrontation between man and woman; in some stories the relationship is portrayed as innocent and pure, in others the relationship becomes more sophisticated and complex. The ten stories in the second part all deal with old Korean or the old Korean way of life - the Korea of byegone days, which is gradually disappearing in the face of industrialization and internationalization. The third group of stories reveals modern Korea in the process of change during the period of the Japanese Occupation, the liberation from the Occupation, and the Korean War. All thirty stories may serve as social documents. From the time of ideological chaos following the independence of Korea in 1945 up to the fall of the USSR in the 1980s, modern Korean literature has been powerfully swayed by Marxist ideology one way or another. Literature has an important role to play in its portrayal of the relations between society and individual people, and it has a particularly vital social function in developing or undeveloped countries. However, the stories in this anthology are not just historical documents. They represent the peak of literary achievements by great and gifted writers in the first half of this century. It is remarkable to find so many talented writers producing so many powerful works of art in a short span of just over 50 years between 1908 and 1965. This anthology is an invitation to readers to grasp how much Korea has attained in the process of its modernization. The authors whose works appear in this volume are: Yi Kwang-su, Kim Dong-in, Hyun Chin-kon, Yi Hyo-suk, Kim Yu-jong, Yi Sang, Kim Dong-ni, O Yung-su, Hwang Sun-won, Sohn, So-hi, Hahn Mu-suk, Sunwu Hwi, Kang Shin-jae, Oh Sang-won, Suh Ki-won, Han Mal-suk, Choi In-hun, Kim sung-ok, Yi Mun-ku.
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.
This book examines one of the seminal chapters in the history of the modern Korea. Through an analysis of texts of various genres and types, the author analyzes Japanese colonialism and modernity and its impact on Korean culture and society during the first half of the twentieth century.
First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This study in comparative literature reinterprets and reevaluates literary texts and socio-historical transitions, moving between the Korean, East Asian, and European contexts (and with particular reference to the reception of Dante Alighieri in the East). In the process, it reexamines the universality of literary values and reopens the questions of what literature is and what it can do. By close reading of texts, it aims to give exposure to Korean literature, in such a way as to attract more attention to the field of world literature and to focus on what kind of relationship they can form and what new horizon of literariness they can construct in the future. This work will help to put the geography of world literature on a more open and just basis, by showing the porous nature of literary migration and supplying the missing links in the current discourse on world literature.
Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema is about the changing constructs of modernity, masculinity, and gender relations and discourses in Korean literature and cinema during the crucial decades of the colonial and postcolonial era, based on close historical examination and a wide-ranging theoretical foundation that look at both western and Korean language sources. It examines Korean literary and cinematic texts from the period that spans from the1920s to the 1960s to reveal the ways in which many arrivals of modernity in Korea--through the traumatic pathways and contexts of colonialism, nation building, war, and industrialization--destabilize and set in flux the notions of gender, class, and nationhood. It probes into some of the most significant aspects of Korean culture in the earlier part of the twentieth century through an interdisciplinary inquiry that deploys methods and seminal texts from the fields of Korean Studies, Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Film Studies. Each chapter is an exploration of a decade, organized around questions about modernity, gender, class, and the nation that are central to understanding the selected texts and their contexts. The nation of Korea has been under threat since the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). Crisis of Gender and the Nation critically analyzes the cultural responses of the nation and its gendered subjects in crisis, represented in a selection of Korean literary and cinematic texts from the colonial period, beginning in the 1920s, to the postcolonial period, up to the 1960s, through the lens of both Western and Korean discourses of gender and postcolonial inquiries of literature and film.