A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature

In A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature renowned professor Kyounghoon Lee takes the reader on a dazzling journey through Korean literature written during the first half of the twentieth century. The unconventional history that results will both fascinate and provoke further interest in the early modern cultural products of a nation whose contemporary culture has ignited curiosity all over the world. This accessible study will find broad appeal among college students, scholars, and readers who are interested in the history and culture of Korea and the Japanese empire.

-- Janet Poole, University of Toronto

Kyounghoon Lee’s A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature: The Birth of Oppa was one of the landmark books when it first came out in 2003 and since then it has remained a classic in modern Korean literature and culture studies. It was a pioneering work of scholarship that embraced a couple of paradigm-shifts that were going on in Korean Studies both domestically in South Korea and abroad in North America: first, the concept of colonial modernity that deconstructed the previously entrenched binary between Korean nationalism and Japanese colonialism; second, re-conceptualization of literary studies as a much more complex discipline of cultural history, popular culture, and literature. Through its brilliant analysis of a vast number texts of various genres and types, Lee offers a comprehensive and insightful look at the thorough-going changes that the imbrication of colonialism and modernity brought to Korea in the first half the 20^th Century. It is one of the most important books in modern literature and culture studies to come out of South Korea and it deserves to be read by the English-speaking world. The ten chapters cover an array of wide-ranging topics. They are mostly independent and self-contained and can be assigned separately for a variety of undergraduate and graduate classes in Korean history, Korean culture/literature, Asian history, and Asian culture/literature. A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature: The Birth of Oppa is a major scholarly achievement and John Frankl indeed does justice to the Korean original in his flawless English translation.

-- Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

One of the most original studies about colonial Korean literature, Kyunghoon Lee’s A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature, once published in English, will raise the standard of scholarship on Korean literature in North America and other English-speaking countries. Without using theoretical jargons, Lee draws our attention to Korean literary texts, especially their minor details that can be easily overlooked, to bring to the fore what colonialization meant to Koreans and how it affected their everyday practices. This book will not only provide fascinating entryways to Korean literature for students and scholars of East Asian and world literature but also rekindle scholarly conversations about how to renew our understanding of colonialism in East Asia. It creates what Bertolt Brecht calls ‘the distancing effect’ to colonial Korean culture, inspiring readers to view what was familiar to them as strange and new. Therefore, I feel certain that many specialists of Korea in other disciplines—including history, anthropology, linguistics, and cultural studies—will find this book intriguing and useful.

-- Yoon Sun Yang, Boston University

An instant classic when it was published in 2004 in Korea, A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature reconsiders some of the most seminal texts of modern Korean literature through a cultural historical lens and offers incisive analyses of how the logic of modernity constructed everyday life and material reality in colonial Korea. Modernity is inseparable from coloniality, and the book gives meticulous yet engaging accounts of how the colonial episteme became externalized in the physical world and symptomized in social one in Korea by focusing on frequently overlooked moments or aspects of these literary works. A notable virtue of the book is that it steers clear of ideologically saturated patterns of reading that have dichotomized nationalist resistance and colonial collaboration as the master paradigm in Korean literary scholarship. It is thus able to open up a new territory in postcolonial studies in Korea and enter into dialogue with studies of global modernity more broadly.

-- Youngju Ryu, University of Mich