Download or read book Mujong The Heartless written by Kwang-su Yi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Yi Kwang su and Modern Korean Literature Muj ng written by Ann Sung-hi Lee and published by Cornell University - Cornell East Asia Series. This book was released on 2005 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950) was one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature. When the serialization of Mujông (The Heartless) began in 1917, it was an immediate sensation, and it occupies a prominent place in the Korean literary canon. The Heartless is the story of a love triangle among three youths during the Japanese occupation. Yi Hyông-sik is a young man in his mid-twenties who is teaching English at a middle school in Seoul. Brilliant but also shy and indecisive, he is torn between two women. Kim Sôn-hyông is from a wealthy Christian family; she has just graduated from a modern, Western-style school and is planning on continuing her studies in the United States. Pak Yông-ch'ae is a musically gifted young woman who was raised in a traditional Confucian manner; due to family misfortune, she has become a kisaeng but remains devoted to Hyông-sik whom she knew as a child. The Heartless goes beyond the level of romantic melodrama and uses these characters to depict Korea's struggles with modern culture and national identity.A long critical introduction discusses Yi Kwang-su's life and work from his birth in 1892 to the publication of his first novel The Heartless in 1917. It contains in-depth analyses of the novel, Yi Kwang-su's literary theory, and early short stories.

Download or read book Han Yong un Yi Kwang su written by Beongcheon Yu and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "No other modern Korean writers living under Japanese rule (1910-1945) experienced the history of their country more intimately and intensely than did Han Yong-un and Yi Kwang-su, for they were more than writers. Han was an eminent Buddhist monk, and Yi was an equally prominent national leader. Their careers crossed often, involving politics, journalism, literature, and religion. And yet they lived a world apart, pursuing opposite paths. Han was revered for his fierce commitment to Korean independence and his single volume of poems, The Silence of My Beloved. Yi, despite all his contributions to the development of modern Korean literature, particularly his first novel Heartless, has been branded a traitor for his collaboration with the Japanese. Even during their lifetimes both attained a mythical status and have since become legends of modern Korea." "In this first book-length study of Han and Yi in English, Beongcheon Yu seeks to demythify them and reassess their achievements as writers. He surveys their careers, reviewing significant events and patterns in their lives, and then confronts their literary works, weighing whatever permanence they may claim. Yu's introduction provides a historical background of modern Korea, and his conclusion brings Han and Yi together, pairing them as has never been done, in an attempt to understand them more clearly as men and as writers." "As is evident in their biographical sketches, Han and Yi had full careers - so colorful and fascinating that they constantly disrupt our proper critical attention to their writings. Yu, in his deliberate contrast of their literary achievements, provides a study of these two highly influential men that is informative and stimulating to general readers and at the same time provocative and challenging to specialists."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Modern Korean Literature written by Chung Chong-Wha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixth book in Kegan Paul International's "Korean Culture Series", this volume contains thirty stories that have been selected on the basis of historical interest and literary worth, each representing a monumental moment in the history of Korean Literature. The ten stories in the first part share the common theme of the Korean experience of the confrontation between man and woman; in some stories the relationship is portrayed as innocent and pure, in others the relationship becomes more sophisticated and complex. The ten stories in the second part all deal with old Korean or the old Korean way of life - the Korea of byegone days, which is gradually disappearing in the face of industrialization and internationalization. The third group of stories reveals modern Korea in the process of change during the period of the Japanese Occupation, the liberation from the Occupation, and the Korean War. All thirty stories may serve as social documents. From the time of ideological chaos following the independence of Korea in 1945 up to the fall of the USSR in the 1980s, modern Korean literature has been powerfully swayed by Marxist ideology one way or another. Literature has an important role to play in its portrayal of the relations between society and individual people, and it has a particularly vital social function in developing or undeveloped countries. However, the stories in this anthology are not just historical documents. They represent the peak of literary achievements by great and gifted writers in the first half of this century. It is remarkable to find so many talented writers producing so many powerful works of art in a short span of just over 50 years between 1908 and 1965. This anthology is an invitation to readers to grasp how much Korea has attained in the process of its modernization. The authors whose works appear in this volume are: Yi Kwang-su, Kim Dong-in, Hyun Chin-kon, Yi Hyo-suk, Kim Yu-jong, Yi Sang, Kim Dong-ni, O Yung-su, Hwang Sun-won, Sohn, So-hi, Hahn Mu-suk, Sunwu Hwi, Kang Shin-jae, Oh Sang-won, Suh Ki-won, Han Mal-suk, Choi In-hun, Kim sung-ok, Yi Mun-ku.

Download or read book A Ready Made Life written by Chong-un Kim and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1998-07-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Ready Made Life is the first volume of early modern Korean fiction to appear in English in the U.S. Written between 1921 and 1943, the sixteen stories are an excellent introduction to the riches of modern Korean fiction. They reveal a variety of settings, voices, styles, and thematic concerns, and the best of them, masterpieces written mainly in the mid-1930s, display an impressive artistic maturity. Included among these authors are Hwang Sun-won, modern Korea's greatest short story writer; Kim Tong-in, regarded by many as the author who best captures the essence of the Korean identity; Ch'ae Man-shik, a master of irony; Yi Sang, a prominent modernist; Kim Yu-jong, whose stories are marked by a unique blend of earthy humor and compassion; Yi Kwang-su and Kim Tong-ni, modernizers of the language of twentieth-century Korean fiction; and Yi Ki-yúng, Yi T'ae-jun, and Pak T'ae-won, three writers who migrated to North Korea shortly after Liberation in 1945 and whose works were subsequently banned in South Korea until democratization in the late 1980s. One way of reading the stories, all of which were written during the Japanese occupation, is that beneath their often oppressive and gloomy surface lies an anticolonial subtext. They can also be read as a collective record of a people whose life choices were severely restricted, not just by colonization, but by education (either too little or too much, as the title story shows) and by a highly structured society that had little tolerance for those who overstepped its boundaries. Life was unremittingly onerous for many Koreans during this period, whatever their social background. In the stories, educated city folk fare little better than farmers and laborers. A Ready-Made Life will provide scholars and students with crucial access to the literature of Korea's colonial period. A generous opening essay discusses the collection in the context of modern Korean literary history, and short introductions precede each story. Here is a richly diverse testament to a modern literature that is poised to assume a long overdue place in world literature.

Download or read book The Best Short Stories of Yi Kwang Su PB Version written by Chang-Wuk Kang M.D. and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Best Short Stories of Yi Kwang-Su (PB) By Chang-Wuk Kang, M.D. Yi Kwang-Su (1892-1950) has undisputedly produced some of the greatest literary works to ever come out of modern Korea. Here is a collection of his short stories, some of which have never before been published in English. He has written over twenty-eight novels, innumerable short stories, poetry collections, treatises, and countless commentaries from literature to art and science—not to mention culture and humanity—and published in all of the available paper media of his time in Korea. His writing style revolutionized Korean literature and the written language itself. These stories abound with Buddhist-themed meditations on matters of the human spirit and soul, as well as his thoughts on overcoming karmic condemnations. His consistency and the sincerity in his writing are such that one cannot help but believe that he practiced what he preached. He was a moralist, and his writing very didactic. It’s not surprising that he asserts that without religion, one cannot improve one’s character. The last two short stories in this collection were written during the period from shortly before the end of the WWII to Korean Independence in 1948. The chaotic and uncertain situation of Korea, along with harsh criticism, forced him to remove himself to the countryside and to live on a farm like an ordinary farmer, even maintaining an ox. Around that time he also stayed in a temple by the grace of his cousin, Yi Hak-Su. It was a time of meditation and refuge for him. There he worked on his spiritual journey, although he never wore a monk’s robe. He accumulated as many experiences as he could, and then he decided to pursue further education. Chang-Wuk Kang, M.D. translates these works beautifully, richly capturing the essence of Yi Kwang-Su’s style and the culture of Korea. He begins the compilation with a biographical summary of Yi Kwang-Su’s life as well as his political influences and literary impact on Korea. (2016, Paperback, 214 pages)

Download or read book Understanding Korean Literature written by Hung-Gyu Kim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the development and characteristics of various historical and contemporary genres of Korean literature. It presents explanations on the development of Korean literacy and offers a history of literary criticism, traditional and modern, giving the discussion an historical context.

Download or read book Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction written by Kim Chul and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction is a compilation of thirteen original essays which was first serialized in a quarterly issued by the National Institute of Korean Language, Saekukŏsaenghwal (Living our National Language Anew) in a column entitled, “Our Fiction, Our Language” between 2004 to 2007. Although the original intent of the Institute was to elucidate on important features particular to “national fiction” and the superiority of “national language,” instead Kim Chul’s astute essays offers a completely different reading of how national literature and language was constructed. Through a series of culturally nuanced readings, Kim links the formation and origins of Korean language and fiction to modernity and traces its origins to the Japanese colonial period while demonstrating in a very lucid way how colonialism constitutes modernity and how all modernity is perforce colonial, given the imperial crucibles from which modernist claims emerged. For Kim, denying this reality can only lead to violent distortions as he eschews appeals to a preexisting framework, preferring instead to ground his theoretical insights in subtle, innovative readings of texts themselves.

Download or read book Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema written by Kelly Y. Jeong and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Kashil and Best Essays by Yi Kwang su written by Translated by Chung-Nan Lee Kim and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-19 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yi Kwang-su was one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature. Throughout his lifetime, 1892 to 1950, Yi wrote twenty-seven novels, numerous short stories, essays, and poems. Most were written during the Japanese colonization of Korea until 1945. In Kashil and Best Essays by Yi Kwang-su, Chung-Nan Lee Kim, Yi's daughter, translates a series of short stories written by her father. Yi Kwang-su contemplates serious topics, such as the purpose of life, destiny, the meaning of death, and reincarnation, and he does so by reflecting on events in his own life and those around him. "Kashil" was based on a short tale described in the "History of Three Kindgdoms." It is considered Yi's landmark historical novel that depicts the destiny of an individual in the context of history. "Memories of My Child Pong-A" describes Yi's devastating sorrow, despair, and self-remorse upon the death of his son Pong-keun whose death strengthened his devotion to Buddhism. "The Narrative of Selling the House" and "The Crow Caws" are important works representing a category of stories based on Yi's private life. With a Buddhist influence, the works in Kashil and Best Essays by Yi Kwang-su reflect the enlightenment ideology of social, educational, economic, political, and cultural reform for Korean self-strengthening, national consciousness, and independence.

Download or read book The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature written by Joshua S. Mostow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-10 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extraordinary one-volume guide to the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea is the definitive reference work on the subject in the English language. With more than one hundred articles that show how a host of authors and literary movements have contributed to the general literary development of their respective countries, this companion is an essential starting point for the study of East Asian literatures. Comprehensive thematic essays introduce each geographical section with historical overviews and surveys of persistent themes in the literature examined, including nationalism, gender, family relations, and sexuality. Following the thematic essays are the individual entries: over forty for China, over fifty for Japan, and almost thirty for Korea, featuring everything from detailed analyses of the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Murakami Haruki, to far-ranging explorations of avant-garde fiction in China and postwar novels in Korea. Arrayed chronologically, each entry is self-contained, though extensive cross-referencing affords readers the opportunity to gain a more synoptic view of the work, author, or movement. The unrivaled opportunities for comparative analysis alone make this unique companion an indispensable reference for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of Asian literature. Although the literatures of China, Japan, and Korea are each allotted separate sections, the editors constantly kept an eye open to those writers, works, and movements that transcend national boundaries. This includes, for example, Chinese authors who lived and wrote in Japan; Japanese authors who wrote in classical Chinese; and Korean authors who write in Japanese, whether under the colonial occupation or because they are resident in Japan. The waves of modernization can be seen as reaching each of these countries in a staggered fashion, with eddies and back-flows between them then complicating the picture further. This volume provides a vivid sense of this dynamic interplay.

Download or read book Our Toes Are Alike written by Kim Dong-in and published by Literature Translation Institute of Korea. This book was released on 2014-11-30 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In “Our Toes Are Alike ” (Balgaragi dalmattda, 1932), Kim deploys his skills as a satirist and sardonic social commentator within a framework of literary naturalism. Here the first-person narrator contemplates the life of his friend “M,” whose debauched sexual adventuring has likely left him sterile. Though the text provides a window into the underlying patriarchal misogyny of the period, the narrator’s incisive portrait of the self-deception that M experiences when his wife unexpectedly becomes pregnant have a larger human resonance. The work also leaves an interesting footnote in Korean literary history: it created a rift between Kim and noted fellow author Yŏm Sang-seop, who believed that the plot had been based upon rumors about his own life.

Download or read book Narratives of Nation Building in Korea written by Sheila Miyoshi Jager and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers new insight on how key historical texts and events in Korea's history have contributed to the formation of the nation's collective consciousness. The work is woven around the unifying premise that particular narrative texts/events that extend back to the premodern period have remained important, albeit transformed, over the modern period and into the contemporary period. The author explores the relationship between gender and nationalism by showing how key narrative topics, such as tales of virtuous womanhood, have been employed, transformed, and re-deployed to make sense of particular national events. Connecting these narratives and historic events to contemporary Korean society, Jager reveals how these "sites" - or reference points - were also successfully re-deployed in the context of the division of Korea and the construction of Korea's modern consciousness.

Download or read book The History of Modern Korean Fiction 1890 1945 written by Young Min Kim and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men written by Yoon Sun Yang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The notion of the individual was initially translated into Korean near the end of the nineteenth century and took root during the early years of Japanese colonial influence. Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were prototypically female figures appearing in the early colonial domestic novel—a genre developed by reform-minded male writers—as schoolgirls, housewives, female ghosts, femmes fatales, and female same-sex partners. Such female figures have long been viewed as lacking in modernity because, unlike numerous male characters in Korean literature after the late 1910s, they did not assert their own modernity, or that of the nation, by exploring their interiority. Yang, however, shows that no reading of Korean modernity can ignore these figures, because the early colonial domestic novel cast them as individuals in terms of their usefulness or relevance to the nation, whether model citizens or iconoclasts. By including these earlier narratives within modern Korean literary history and positing that they too were engaged in the translation of individuality into Korean, Yang’s study not only disrupts the canonical account of a non-gendered, linear progress toward modern Korean selfhood but also expands our understanding of the role played by translation in Korea’s construction of modern gender roles."

Download or read book Modern Korean Literature written by Peter H. Lee and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1990-11-01 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Korea in the twentieth century has been a grim succession of oppressions, humiliations, and betrayals. Yet through it all, modern Korean writers have been able not only to find their own distinctive voices but to forge a national literature that speaks eloquently of the survival of the human spirit in times of crisis. This anthology includes the finest translations available of representative works in all the major genres, including poetry, fiction, essays, and drama. Readers will gain a clear sense of the development of twentieth-century Korean literature and a vivid impression of the resilience, strength, and tenacity of modern Korean writers.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Modern Korean Literature written by Kyounghoon Lee and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.