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.

This book explores the history of modern Korean literature from a sociocultural perspective. Rather than focusing solely on specific authors and their works, Young Min Kim argues that the development of modern media, shifting conceptualizations of the author, and a growing mass readership fundamentally shaped the types of narratives that appeared at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, Kim follows the trajectory of the sin sosŏl (new fiction) as it meshed with the new print and media culture to give rise to innovative and hybrid genres and literary styles. In doing so, he compellingly illuminates the relationship between literary systems and forms and underscores the necessity of re-locating literary texts in their sociohistorical contexts.

The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature consists of 35 chapters written by leaders in the field, who explore significant topics and who have pioneered innovative approaches. The collection highlights the most dynamic current scholarship on Korean literature, presenting rigorous literary analysis, interdisciplinary methodologies, and transregional thinking so as to provide a valuable and inspiring resource for researchers and students alike. This Companion has particular significance as the most extensive collection to date of English-language articles on Korean literature; it both offers a thorough intellectual engagement with current scholarship and addresses a broad range of topics and time periods, from premodern to contemporary. It will contribute to an understanding of literature as part of a broad sociocultural process that aims to put the field into conversation with other fields of study in the humanities and social sciences. While presenting rigorous and innovative academic research that will be useful to graduate students and researchers, the chapters in the collection are written to be accessible to the average upper-level undergraduate student and include only minimal use of academic jargon. In an effort to provide substantially helpful material for researching, teaching, and learning Korean literature, this Companion includes as an appendix an extensive list of English translations of Korean literature.

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.

Understanding modern Korean culture requires more than just a cursory glance. For a country steeped in such a long history, it is important to go back and look carefully at older times to reach a complete picture of the modern cultural paradigm. Wanne J. Joe has done just that in this extensive book that details how Korean culture grew and flourished from the Joseon Dynasty through to the March 1 Independence Movement in 1919.

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.

This new textbook is a timely and interdisciplinary resource for students looking for an introduction to Korean popular culture, exploring the multifaceted meaning of Korean popular culture at micro and macro levels and the process of cultural production, representation, circulation and consumption in a global context. Drawing on perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, including media and communications, film studies, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history and literature, this book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Korean popular culture and its historical underpinnings, changing roles and dynamic meanings in the present moment of the digital social media age. The book’s sections include: K-pop Music Popular Cinema Television Web Drama, Webtoon and Animation Digital Games and Esports Lifestyle Media, Fashion and Food Nation Branding An accessible, comprehensive and thought-provoking work, providing historical and contemporary contexts, key issues and debates, this textbook will appeal to students of and providers of courses on popular culture, media studies and Korean culture and society more broadly.