Books in the Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies series

Drawing on Korean and Japanese texts ranging from critical essays to short stories produced in the colonial and post-colonial periods, this book analyzes the ways in which Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist discourse pivoted on such concepts as language, literature, and culture.

Paik Nak-chung is one of Korea's most incisive contemporary public intellectuals. By training a literary scholar, he is perhaps best known as an eloquent cultural and political critic. This volume deals with his life and work.

This book vividly traces the genealogy of modern womanhood in the encounters between Koreans and American Protestant missionaries in the early twentieth century, during Korea's colonization by Japan. Hyaeweol Choi shows that what it meant to be a "e;modern"e; Korean woman was deeply bound up in such diverse themes as Korean nationalism, Confucian gender practices, images of the West and Christianity, and growing desires for selfhood. Her historically specific, textured analysis sheds new light on the interplay between local and global politics of gender and modernity.

As millions of women and girls left country towns to generate Korea's manufacturing boom, the factory girl emerged as an archetypal figure in twentieth-century popular culture. This book explores the factory girl in Korean literature showing the complex ways in which she as embodied the sexual and class violence of industrial life.