The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature

by Heekyoung Cho (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032202662
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/26/2025
Series:	Routledge Literature Companions
Pages:	750
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Heekyoung Cho is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature. Her articles discuss topics on translation and the creation of modern fiction, translation and censorship, serial publication, world literature, and webcomics. Her current research focuses on seriality in cultural production in both old and new media, including digital serialization and transmedial production, as well as graphic narratives and media platforms.

Table of Contents

Introduction—"Redefined and Challenged: Anthologizing Korean Literary Studies"

Heekyoung Cho

Part I. Premodern and Early Modern Korean Literature

Section I. Manuscript Culture, Materiality, Performativity

1. Manuscript, Not Print, in the Book World of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910)

Si Nae Park

2. Performing Vernacular: Textual Practices as Bodily Events in Premodern Korea

Hwisang Cho

Section II. Print, Medium, Transregional Interactions

3. Books for the Illiterate: the Haengsil-to (Illustrated Guide for Moral Deeds) of Chosŏn Korea

Young Kyun Oh

4. Print and Transnational Referentiality: Nam Kong-ch’ŏl’s Printing of Kŭmnŭng chip

Suyoung Son

Section III. Novel, Gender Dynamics, Transgression

5. The Elite Vernacular Korean Culture of Chosŏn (1392-1910): Indeterminacy, Hybridity, Strangeness

Ksenia Chizhova

6. Lovesickness and Death in Seventeenth-Century Korean Literature

Janet Yoon-sun Lee

Section IV. Language and Writing, Vernacular, Hybridity

7. Idu in and as Korean Literature

Ross King

8. Hybrid Orthographies and the Emergence of Modern Literature in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

Daniel Pieper

Part II. Modernity and the Colonial Period

Section I. Gender and Sexuality

9. Capital, Gender, and Modernity in Colonial Korean Literature

Kelly Y. Jeong

10. Sexual Violence and Its Ideological Labor: Imagining Masculinist Equality and Androcentric Ethnos in Colonial Korean Literature

Jin-kyung Lee

Section II. Translation and Crossing

11. Incongruent Reflections: Translation and Bilingual Writings in Colonial Korea

Yoon Jeong Oh

12. The Japanese "Café France": Chŏng Chi-yong and Self-Translation

David Krolikoski

13. Nonsense As Sensibility: The Importance of Not Being Earnest in Colonial Korea and Taiwan

Evelyn Shih

Section III. Modernity and Coloniality

14. Language, Science, and the Status of Truth in Late Colonial Korea

Christopher P. Hanscom

15. A Minor Modernist’s Conundrum of Representation: Kim Saryang and the Colonized I-Novel

Nayoung Aimee Kwon

16. Rewriting the City: Yi Sang, Architecture, and the Figure of the Department Store

Jina E. Kim

Section IV. Art and Politics

17. A Forgotten Aesthetic: Reportage in Colonial Korea, 1920s–1930s

Sunyoung Park

18. Literature (chŏnhyang sosŏl) and the Inward Gaze in the Late Colonial Period

Mi-Ryong Shim

Part III. Liberation and Contemporary Korean Literature

Section I. Decolonization, Cold War, Humanism

19. Decolonizing Literature: Bridging Political Divides in the Post-Liberation Period

Jonathan Glade

20. Vitalism and Existentialism in Early South Korean Literature

Jae Won Edward Chung

21. Humanism as a Problem of Empire in Modern Korean Literature

Travis Workman

Section II. Politics, Memory, Orality

22. Gender and Class Dynamics in the Utilitarian Discourse of the Developmental State and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea

Serk-Bae Suh

23. (Dis)embodiment of Memory: Gender, Memory, and Ethics in Human Acts by Han Kang

Ji-Eun Lee

24. Continuing Orality in Korean Poetry: Opening a P’an for the Page

Ivanna Sang Een Yi

Section III. Race, Diaspora, Intersectionality

25. Ŏmma’s Baby, Appa’s Maybe: Black Amerasian Children and the Layers of Diaspora

Jang Wook Huh

26. Intersecting Korean Diasporas

Christina Yi

27. Whose Korea is it? Reading Zainichi Literature Intersectionally

Cindi Textor

Section IV. Division and North Korean Literature

28. Closed Borders and Open Letters in the Cold War Koreas

I Jonathan Kief

29. A Good Wife is Hard to Find: North Korean Women in Fiction

Immanuel Kim

30. Children’s Literature in South and North Korea

Dafna Zur

Part IV. Queer Studies, World Literature, the Digital Humanities

Section I. Queer Reading and Affect

31. Forms of Attachment: Ardent Female Intimacies in 1920s Korea

Samuel Perry

32. The Poet and the Theater: Perverse Reading and Queer Poetry

Ungsan Kim

Section II. World Literature, Global Connections, the Digital Humanities

33. World Literature, Korean Literature, and the Medical and Health Humanities

Karen Thornber

34. Global Korea and World Literature

Jenny Wang Medina

35. The Text-Mining of Culture: The Case of a Popular Magazine in 1930s Korea

Jae-Yon Lee and Hyun-Joo Kim

Appendix: A Comprehensive List of English Translations of Korean Literature

Hyokyoung Yi