ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

Redefined and Challenged: Anthologizing Korean Literary Studies

part I|142 pages

Premodern and Early Modern Korean Literature

section Section I|38 pages

Manuscript Culture, Materiality, Performativity

chapter 2|16 pages

Performing Vernacular

Textual Practices as Bodily Events in Premodern Korea

section Section II|36 pages

Print, Medium, Transregional Interactions

chapter 3|18 pages

Books for the Illiterate

The Haengsil-to (Illustrated Guide for Moral Deeds) of Chosŏn Korea

chapter 4|16 pages

Print and Transnational Referentiality

Nam Kong-ch'ŏl's Printing of Kŭmnŭng chip

section Section III|29 pages

Novel, Gender Dynamics, Transgression

section Section IV|36 pages

Language and Writing, Vernacular, Hybridity

part II|142 pages

Modernity and the Colonial Period

section Section I|26 pages

Gender and Sexuality

chapter 10|12 pages

Sexual Violence and its Ideological Labor

Imagining Masculinist Equality and Androcentric Ethnos in Colonial Korean Literature

section Section II|41 pages

Translation and Crossing

chapter 11|12 pages

Incongruent Reflections

Translation and Bilingual Writings in Colonial Korea

chapter 12|13 pages

The Japanese “CafÉ France”

Chŏng Chi-yong and Self-Translation

chapter 13|14 pages

Nonsense as Sensibility

The Importance of Not Being Earnest in Colonial Korea and Taiwan

section Section III|44 pages

Modernity and Coloniality

chapter 15|12 pages

A Minor Modernist's Conundrum of Representation

Kim Saryang and the Colonized I-Novel

chapter 16|14 pages

Rewriting the City

Yi Sang, Architecture, and the Figure of the Department Store

section Section IV|28 pages

Art and Politics

chapter 17|15 pages

A Forgotten Aesthetic

Reportage in Colonial Korea, 1920s–1930s 1

part III|169 pages

Liberation and Contemporary Korean Literature

section Section I|42 pages

Decolonization, Cold War, Humanism

chapter 19|13 pages

Decolonizing Literature

Bridging Political Divides in the Post-Liberation Period

section Section II|40 pages

Politics, Memory, Orality

chapter 23|14 pages

(Dis)Embodiment of Memory

Gender, Memory, and Ethics in Human Acts by Han Kang

chapter 24|12 pages

Continuing Orality in Korean Poetry

Opening a P'an for the Page

section Section III|42 pages

Race, Diaspora, Intersectionality

chapter 25|14 pages

Ŏmma's Baby, Appa's Maybe

Black Amerasian Children and the Layers of Diaspora

chapter 26|13 pages

Intersecting Korean Diasporas

section Section IV|43 pages

Division and North Korean Literature

chapter 29|12 pages

A Good Wife is Hard to Find

North Korean Women in Fiction

part IV|78 pages

Queer Studies, World Literature, the Digital Humanities

section Section I|32 pages

Queer Reading and Affect

chapter 31|15 pages

Forms of Attachment

Ardent Female Intimacies in 1920s Korea

chapter 32|15 pages

The Poet and the Theater

Perverse Reading and Queer Poetry

section Section II|44 pages

World Literature, Global Connections, the Digital Humanities

chapter 35|19 pages

The Text-Mining of Culture

The Case of a Popular Magazine in 1930s Korea