Koreana is a full-color quarterly on Korean culture and arts, including traditional heritage as well as modern and contemporary activities. Each issue includes in-depth coverage of a selected theme, followed by an array of articles on artists and artisans, historic and cultural landmarks, natural attractions, reviews of stage performances and exhibitions, literary pieces, and today’s lifestyles. Published since 1987, the magazine can also be accessed at (www.koreana.or.kr).

Koreana is a full-color quarterly on Korean culture and arts, including traditional heritage as well as modern and contemporary activities. Each issue includes in-depth coverage of a selected theme, followed by an array of articles on artists and artisans, historic and cultural landmarks, natural attractions, reviews of stage performances and exhibitions, literary pieces, and today’s lifestyles. Published since 1987, the magazine can also be accessed at (www.koreana.or.kr).

Koreana is a full-color quarterly on Korean culture and arts, including traditional heritage as well as modern and contemporary activities. Each issue includes in-depth coverage of a selected theme, followed by an array of articles on artists and artisans, historic and cultural landmarks, natural attractions, reviews of stage performances and exhibitions, literary pieces, and today’s lifestyles. Published since 1987, the magazine can also be accessed at (www.koreana.or.kr).

Korean Communication, Media, and Culture is a bibliography of English-language publications for non-Korean-speaking academics, researchers, and professionals. In addition to the actual annotations of all the major books, book chapters, journal articles, and theses/dissertations, each chapter includes contextual introductory commentary on its topic. The authors not only historicize their findings but they also prescribe the direction that English-language research on Korean communication should take.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of North Korea’s nuclear strategies and of the decisions which explain its strategic motivations. The existence of two separate Koreas is an accepted outcome of the current international system. However, in today’s emerging multipolar order, the question of Korean legitimacy remains unresolved and South Korea finds itself surrounded by three nuclear powers— China, Russia, and, de facto, North Korea. This book traces North Korea’s nuclear quest across three major epochs: the Cold War, the post-Cold War, and post- September 11 periods. Through these lenses, the book reveals the underlying drivers of North Korea’s nuclear decisions and strategies, providing evidence that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not only intended to guarantee the survival of the Kim regime but also hold the key for Pyongyang to resolve the lingering question over Korean legitimacy. The book provides evidence, through a longitudinal case study, that North Korea’s nuclear program provides a means to achieve full sovereign control of the Korean Peninsula by exploiting future opportunities in an increasingly multipolar international order. This book will be of interest to students in the fields of foreign policy, defense policy, nuclear proliferation, Korean Studies and International Relations.

One of the most important and popular premodern Korean novels, The Story of Hong Gildong is a fast-paced adventure story about the illegitimate son of a nobleman who becomes the leader of a band of honest outlaws who take from the rich and punish the corrupt. Despite the importance of the work to Korean culture—it is often described as the story of the Korean Robin Hood—studies of the novel have been hindered by a number of myths, namely that it was authored in the early sixteenth century by statesman Heo Gyun, who wrote it not only in protest of Joseon-dynasty laws on the rights of illegitimate children, but also as a manifesto of his own radical political ideas. In Invincible and Righteous Outlaw, the first book-length study of the novel in English, Minsoo Kang reveals that The Story of Hong Gildong was most likely written by an anonymous mid-nineteenth-century writer whose primary concern was appealing to the increasing number of readers in the late Joseon looking to be entertained and that the myth of Heo’s authorship can be traced to the writing of literary scholar Kim Taejun in the 1930s. Following a detailed examination of the history and literary significance of the novel—including analysis based on Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the universal figure of the noble robber—Kang surveys the many afterlives of the hero Hong Gildong, who throughout the decades has appeared and reappeared in countless revisionist novels, films, television dramas, and comics, even inspiring the creation of a Hong Gildong theme park in South Korea. He shows how the story was altered, distorted, and reinvigorated during and after the Japanese colonial period in both the North and the South for political, social, and literary purposes. While demonstrating the continued relevance of the novel and its hero in Korean culture up to the present day, Kang makes it clear that such narratives have served mostly to distance readers from a better understanding of this classic work.

A Place to Live brings together in a single volume an introduction to Yi Chung-hwan’s (1690–1756) T’aengniji (Treatise on Choosing Settlement)—one of the most widely read and influential of the Korean classics—and an annotated translation of the text, including the author’s postscript. Yi composed the T’aengniji in the 1750s, a time when, despite King Yŏngjo’s (r. 1724–1776) policy of impartiality, the scholar-gentry class continued to identifiy strongly with literati factions and to participate in the political scene as such. A prominent secretary who had his career cut short because of suspected involvement in one of the largest literati purges at court, Yi endured long periods of living in exile before finishing the T’aengniji in his early sixties. The treatise, his only substantial work, is based largely on his travels throughout the Korean peninsula and presents not only his views on the desirability of places for settlement, but also his opinions on contemporary matters and criticism of government policy. As a result, the T’aengniji circulated as an anonymous work for many years. Employing the latest research on T’aengniji manuscripts, translator Inshil Yoon maintains in her introduction that the original title of the treatise was Sadaebu kagŏch’ŏ (Livable Places for the Scholar-Gentry); she goes on to discuss in detail its reception by premodern and contemporary scholars and the treatise’s ongoing popularity as evidenced by the numerous versions and translations done in this and the previous century, its having been made into a novel, and current usage of “t’aengniji” as a noun meaning “regional geography” or “travelogue.” The present translation is based on the Chosŏn Kwangmunhoe edition.