Lexington Books Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again

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. Review 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 Crisis 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 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 About the Author Kelly Y. Jeong is assistant professor of Korean Studies at the University of California, Riverside.