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 sets out to discuss how thematic instances of “crises in masculinity” in literary and cinematic narratives illuminate the traumatic arrival of colonial (and postcolonial) modernity to the Korean Peninsula. Chapter 1 opens the volume by describing how the “New Women” of the 1920s emerged as a symptom of the negative effects of modernity in the works of three colonial Korean male writers. Drawing on existing secondary materials to support readings of the chosen literary texts, this chapter describes how individual aspirations of the New Women were at loggerheads with the Korean male intellectuals' presumably nationalist and anti-colonial objectives. Chapter 2 discusses the Liberation Space (translated in this work as “the Space of Decolonization,” 1945–50) and how selected male authors' perceived guilt of having collaborated with the colonial government is expressed in their works. Chapter 3 returns to what the...