Books in the Research on Korea series

During the decades around 1900, Koreans experienced a world falling apart and the need to quickly build a new one. Intellectuals naturally took centre stage in this era of epistemic paradigm change. This book is devoted to the study of the life and ideas of some of these intellectuals, focussing on how they dealt with the challenges of their times. Where did their respective moral and intellectual stances lead them, and what were the social, economic, and political constraints that bounded their trajectories? Their life stories provide micro-historical insights into a period that has been formative for modern and contemporary Korea, and illustrate the intellectual ferment inherent in an era of crisis and transition.

The chapters of this edited volume examine the way in which South Korea has coped with the challenges in its political system, political economy, and political society since its transition to formal democracy, and provide a focused critical assessment of three decades after democratization.

Das Buch untersucht anhand unterschiedlicher Quellen den Stellenwert bauhandwerklichen Fachwissens in der zentralen Administration der «Chos¿n-Zeit» mit Fokus auf das 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Hierzu analysiert der Autor zunächst die Beamtenprüfungen und ihre Inhalte sowie die Strukturen des staatlichen Bauwesens. Er untersucht auf Basis des Genres der «¿igwe» die Projektorganisation bei Bauvorhaben im Rahmen staatlicher Legitimation. Der Autor zeigt die Manifestation des kanonisierten Wissens in den staatlichen Strukturen auf und stellt diesen anschließend die Kritiken und Vorschläge progressiver Gelehrter, der sogenannten «sirhak», gegenüber. Diese zeugen von privater Wertschätzung von bauhandwerklichem Wissen, aber vergeblichen Veränderungsbemühungen.

This case study on hypertextuality in late Choson dynasty literature deals with works of narrative fiction in prose modelled after Kuunmong by Kim Manjung. The focus is laid on a novel extant in two manuscripts: Sinjung Kuullu and Sinjung chaeja Kuun'gi.

The volume assembles an interdisciplinary range of articles that look into the secondary transformation of knowledge in Choson Korea, i.e. processes of interpretive adaptation, of dissection, selection and re-assemblage, of reduction and amplification, as well as of blending with existing cognitive structures and material objectification.

The book is about the evolution and transformation of knowledge and knowledge systems in the context of cultural contact, taking Korea as an example. Combining philological and social sciences approaches, it deals with the configuration, dissemination and consolidation of knowledge in certain contexts of the past and present.

The essays in this book explore the possibility of new approaches for the study of Korean civil society and democracy by combining interdisciplinary and transregional research, thereby making a direct contribution to the field of democracy after democratization focusing on developments in Germany, Korea, and Eastern Europe.

This book analyzes policy translation and its ends, how the concept of translation explains the emergence and (ex-)changes of policy ideas in different places and/or across borders in general, as well as the effectiveness of this concept in analyzing cases of actual policy dissemination. The countries to be discussed are South Korea and Germany.

The volume assembles an interdisciplinary range of articles that look at the production, consumption and dissemination of knowledge in East Asia, centering on Korea, under the paradigm of knowledge circulation. Special attention is paid to the spatial and social aspects of knowledge circulation and transformation.