ABSTRACT

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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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 2. Proletarian Reality and Leftist Literature of 1920s and 1930s Colonial Korea 3. The Colonial Frontier: Primitive Accumulation, Migration, and Settler Colonialism in Kando Literature 4. Decolonizing the Future: Postcolonial Themes in South Korean Science Fiction 5. The Mad Father in the Attic: Torture and the Ethics of Accountability in Post-Authoritarian Korean Fiction Part 2: Crossing Borders, Redrawing Boundaries 6. In the Shadow of Nation and Empire: Northwestern Writers in Colonial Seoul 7. Border Crossings between Decolonization and the Cold War: Rethinking Postliberation Literature, 1945–1950 8. Fracturing Literary Boundaries: Connecting with the Korean Peninsula in Postwar Japan 9. Crossing the Great Divide: Mid-Century Modernism on the Korean Peninsula 10. Division Literature and Visions for De-Bordering: Ch’oe Inhun, Pak Wansŏ, and Individuals without Belonging 11. South Korean Activist Readers of North Korean Literature Part 3: Rationality in Literature and its Limits: Scientists, Detectives, and Doctors 12. Literary Negotiations with Western Science in Post-Confucian Korea 13. The Development of Detective Fiction in Colonial Korea 14. Curing, But Not Healing, in Pak Wansŏ’s "During Three Days of that Autumn" Part 4: Transnational Archives: Language, Ethnicity, and Translation 15. The Figure of the Translator: Kim Saryang Between Korean and Japanese Literatures 16. Zainichi Writers and the Postcoloniality of Modern Korean Literature 17. Interracial Romance, Unlawful Marriage: Transpacific Encounters in Early Korean-American Literature 18. Autobiography of Others: Dictée’s Counter-Hegemonic Feminism 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 20. Make Noise, Not War: Television in Yusin-Era Literature 21. Radicalizing Against Polarities: Poetry and Print Culture in the 1980's Literary Topography