“A vibrant account of the travails of Japanese colonialism as experienced by workers and women by the pioneering feminist writer of the Korean left.” —Andre Schmid, author of Korea Between Empires A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English, From Wonso Pond transforms the love triangle between three protagonists into a revealing portrait of the living conditions that led to modern Korea, both North and South. “A fatherless young girl now poised to become the victim of [the landlord’s] lecherous fangs and paws,” begins one of the original newspaper teasers describing From Wonso Pond and the fate of its heroine, Sonbi. In a plot rich with Dickensian overtones, the novel paints a vivid picture of life in what is now North Korea through the eyes of Sonbi, her childhood neighbor, Ch’otchae, and a restless law student, Sinch’ol, as they journey separately from a small, impoverished village ruled by the lecherous land baron to the port city of Inch’on. But life is hardly easier there, as Sonbi wears herself out boiling silk threads twelve hours a day while Ch’otchae and Sinch’ol load rice on the docks. All three become involved with underground activists, fighting the oppression of country and city, as well as their Japanese colonial rulers. “An astonishing achievement . . . From a colonized Korea, Kang sets the stage for the tragic birth of two rival nations. John Dos Passos and George Orwell may have had a Korean sister yet.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko

This “fascinating autobiography” from an award-winning Asian-American female author “reads like a novel” (The Washington Post Book World). With insight, candor, and grace, Shirley Geok-lin Lim recalls her path from her poverty-stricken childhood in war-torn Malaysia to her new and exciting yet uncertain womanhood in America. Grappling to secure a place for herself in the United States, she is often caught between the stifling traditions of the old world and the harsh challenges of the new. But throughout her journey, she is sustained by her “warrior” spirit, gradually overcoming her sense of alienation to find a new identity as an Asian American woman: professor, wife, mother, and, above all, an impassioned writer. In Among the White Moon Faces, Lim offers a memorable rendering of immigrant women’s experience and a reflection upon the homelands we leave behind, the homelands we discover, and the homelands we hold within ourselves. “What sets Among the White Moon Faces apart is that Lim writes with such aching precision, revealing and insightfully analyzing her changing roles as woman, immigrant, scholar, and Other.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “Lim’s descriptions are both lyrical and precise.” —Publishers Weekly “Evocative writing bolstered by insights into colonialism, race relations, and the concept of the ‘other’. . . . This is an entrancing memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Imperial Genus begins with the turn to world culture and ideas of the generally human in Japan’s cultural policy in Korea in 1919. How were concepts of the human’s genus-being operative in the discourses of the Japanese empire? How did they inform the imagination and representation of modernity in colonial Korea? Travis Workman delves into these questions through texts in philosophy, literature, and social science. Imperial Genus focuses on how notions of human generality mediated uncertainty between the transcendental and the empirical, the universal and the particular, and empire and colony. It shows how cosmopolitan cultural principles, the proletarian arts, and Pan-Asian imperial nationalism converged with practices of colonial governmentality. It is a genealogy of the various articulations of the human’s genus-being within modern humanist thinking in East Asia, as well as an exploration of the limits of the human as both concept and historical figure.

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.

Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist’, the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western’ in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.

The University of Washington-Korea Studies Program, in collaboration with Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, is proud to publish the Journal of Korean Studies. In 1979 Dr. James Palais (PhD Harvard 1968), former UW professor of Korean History edited and published the first volume of the Journal of Korean Studies. For thirteen years it was a leading academic forum for innovative, in-depth research on Korea. In 2004 former editors Gi-Wook Shin and John Duncan revived this outstanding publication at Stanford University. In August 2008 editorial responsibility transferred back to the University of Washington. With the editorial guidance of Clark Sorensen and Donald Baker, the Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) continues to be dedicated to publishing outstanding articles, from all disciplines, on a broad range of historical and contemporary topics concerning Korea. In addition the JKS publishes reviews of the latest Korea-related books. To subscribe to the Journal of Korean Studies or order print back issues, please click here.

Gender in Modern East Asia explores the history of women and gender in China, Korea, and Japan from the seventeenth century to the present. This unique volume treats the three countries separately within each time period while also placing them in global and regional contexts. Its transnational and integrated approach connects the cultural, economic, and social developments in East Asia to what is happening across the wider world. The text focuses specifically on the dynamic histories of sexuality; gender ideology, discourse, and legal construction; marriage and the family; and the gendering of work, society, culture, and power. Important themes and topics woven through the text include Confucianism, writing and language, the role of the state in gender construction, nationalism, sexuality and prostitution, New Women and Modern Girls, feminisms, "comfort" women, and imperialism. Accessibly written and comprehensive, Gender in Modern East Asia is a much-needed contribution to the study of the region.