Description
Book SynopsisCrisis 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 Koreathrough the traumatic pathways and contexts of colonialism, nation building, war, and industrializationdestabilize 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 Stu
Trade ReviewCrisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again compellingly reveals the shifting historicity of patriarchy and masculinism as centrally intersecting with the very processes of colonial and postcolonial modernization and nation-building. The book's acute analysis of the cultural representations of genders and sexualities forcefully engages us with the most complex and challenging historical periods, events, and issues, such as, for example, Korean masculinity under the Japanese imperialization policy, 'pro-Japanese' writers and their recantations in the immediate post-Liberation period, and besieged Korean patriarchy under U.S. hegemony in the post-Korean War era. Crisis of Gender and the Nation is a major contribution to multiple fields—the studies of Korean and Asian literature and cinema, of gender and sexuality, of colonialism and postcoloniality, of nationalism and of (neo/post) colonial modernity—all of which most productively crisscross one another in Jeong's book. -- Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego
In this expansive and theoretically astute study of the relationship between masculinity and colonialism, Kelly Jeong takes us on an illuminating journey through the entire spectrum of Korean literature and cinema in the twentieth century. This is an important contribution to the studies of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality, specifically calibrated around the changing crisis of masculinity in a nation where the story of modernity is that of repetition, not arrival. -- Shu-mei Shih, University of California, Los Angeles; author of The Lure of the Modern
Kelly Jeong makes a major contribution to our understanding of colonial and postcolonial modernity by showing how changing representations of gendered subjects are key to the ways in which Korean intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers negotiate pre-1945 colonial regimes of knowledge, as well as post-1945 nation-building and developmentalism. Jeong's arguments are compelling and new to the field; her work will have a profound impact on the ways in which scholars working in literature, film, and history approach twentieth-century Korean modernity. -- Theodore Hughes, Columbia University
I recommend this book for readers who are interested in various issues regarding modernity in Korea, including the feminism and nationalism depicted in the literature within the historical period between the 1930s and the 1960s. * Korean Studies *
Table of ContentsChapter 1 1. Introduction Chapter 2 2. New Woman, Romance, and Railroads: The Paradox of Colonial Modernity Chapter 3 3. Burden of the Past: Confessional Writings in the Space of Decolonization Chapter 4 4. Literature of Instability and Despair: Woman and Masculinity in Postwar Fiction Chapter 5 5. Nation Re-Building and Postwar South Korean Cinema: The Coachman and The Stray Bullet Chapter 6 6. Conclusion
