David R. McCann

The Story of Ch'ŏyong, a Parable of Literary Negotiation

The Story of Chŏyong, from the thirteenth-century compilation of myths, legends, histories, and songs known as the Samguk yusa (Remnants of the Three Kingdoms), has attracted a great deal of attention in Korean scholarly circles. Much of the interest in the story has a nationalist flavor, in the sense that it is drawn to explain the seemingly passive behavior of the storys central character, the son of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea, when he confronts a rather unpleasant scene upon returning to his home in the Shilla capital, Kyŏngju. How can a culture hero such as Chŏyong behave in what seems to be a weak and indecisive way, the scholars ask. Most of the explanations ignore the admittedly obscure female character in the story, the beautiful woman who is Chŏyongs wife. The present article pursues the question of what happens when the identity of the woman is considered a central rather than peripheral element in the story.

Texts as Contracts in the Political Economy of Korea, 1896-1926

This study explores a process of negotiated political and economic dispossession in Korea from the late 1890s, when ideas of modernization first began to invoke an implicit relationship with the West, to the 1919 Declaration of Korean Independence. It examines the middle stages of the political dispossession, a process that eventually framed the discourse characteristic of the poems of Manhae Han Yong-un, Sowŏl Kim Chŏng-shik, and other Korean writers of the 1920s—poems in which little or nothing is ever stated about the actual conditions of life in Korea at the time, and in which the addressee is characteristically a person who is loved but absent.

Chinese Diction in Korean Shijo Verse

Premodern Korean literature comprises vernacular works such as the shijo and kasa verse forms, as well as prose tales, memoirs, diaries, and other materials. It also includes a vast amount of writing in classical Chinese, both poetry and prose, formal and informal. Although these two strands, vernacular Korean and classical Chinese, are generally considered in mutual isolation in studies of Korean literature, they commingle in various ways. The Korean language makes use of a large store of words of Chinese origin. Korean literary works, whether written in the vernacular or in classical Chinese, frequently cite Chinese literary or cultural/historical examples. Given the apparent influence of Chinese upon Korean, how has the Korean identity articulated and sustained itself? This study of Korean shijo verse explores the very permeable boundaries between the two realms to see if—and, if so, how—the areas of transition may mark the outlines of what is Korean in Korean literature.