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Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 13
Lee Y-J. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 13. 13th ed. Cambridge, MA: Korea Institute, Harvard University; 2020 pp. 388.Abstract

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture promotes Korean literature among English-language readers. Each issue may include works of contemporary Korean writers and poets, as well as essays and book reviews by Korean studies professors in the United States. Azalea introduces to the world new writers as well as promising translators, providing the academic community of Korean studies with well-translated texts for college courses. Writers from around the world also share their experience of Korean literature or culture with wider audiences.

Azalea is published yearly by the Korea Institute, Harvard University, with generous funding by the International Communication Foundation, Seoul.

Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Distributed by the University of Hawai‘i Press

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 12
Lee Y-J. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 12. 12th ed. Cambridge, MA: Korea Institute, Harvard University; 2019 pp. 435.Abstract

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture promotes Korean literature among English-language readers. Each issue may include works of contemporary Korean writers and poets, as well as essays and book reviews by Korean studies professors in the United States. Azalea introduces to the world new writers as well as promising translators, providing the academic community of Korean studies with well translated texts for college courses. Writers from around the world also share their experience of Korean literature or culture with wider audiences.

Azalea 12 is rich in novels, and all five of these works will draw readers into the heart of current issues facing Korea. Three of these stories have won the GKL translation award. It is expected that the winners of this award will contribute greatly to the globalization of Korean literature in the near future.

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 11
Lee Y-J. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 11. Cambridge, MA: Korea Institute, Harvard University; 2018.Abstract
AZALEA is published yearly by the Korea Institute, Harvard University, with generous funding by the International Communication Foundation, Seoul. Translations from the Korean original were supported by the Korean Literature Translation Institute. 
Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 10
McCann DR, Lee Y-J ed. Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Vol. 10. Cambridge, MA: Korea Institute, Harvard University; 2017.
See also: Azalea
Abstract
AZALEA is published yearly by the Korea Institute, Harvard University, with generous funding by the International Communication Foundation, Seoul. Translations from the Korean original were supported by the Korean Literature Translation Institute.
Score One for the Dancing Girl, and Other Selections from the Kimun Ch'onghwa: A Story Collection from Ninteenth-Century Korea
King R, Park SN ed. Score One for the Dancing Girl, and Other Selections from the Kimun Ch'onghwa: A Story Collection from Ninteenth-Century Korea. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press; 2016. Website

 

Score One for the Dancing Girl presents more than a hundred stories from an early-nineteenth-century collection of yadam stories, the Kimun ch’onghwa (“Compendium of Records of Hearsay”). Prose tales that feature historical people and places but may also include fantastical elements, the yadam stories in this volume feature ghosts and magic, courtesans and sex, and court politics. They constitute both an entertaining literary collection and a rich treasure trove of information about life in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Korea.

The first volume in an ongoing series of translations of classic Korean literature by the Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale (1863–1937), Score One for the Dancing Girl includes the original literary Sinitic (hanmun) text and Gale’s English translation. Both the hanmun and English are extensively annotated.  Introductory essays by Ross King and Si Nae Park discuss the yadam genre, Gale’s life and career, and the ways in which his background as a Christian missionary affected the translations.

 

Chejudo Yohaeng Ilchi (Travelogue to Cheju)
Kim SJ ed. Chejudo Yohaeng Ilchi (Travelogue to Cheju). Seoul, Korea: Minsokwon; 2016. Website Link

『제주도여행일지』는 1909년 5월10일에서 9월 27일까지 이름을 알 수 없는 한 일본인이 기록한 그림일기이다.
이 기간 일기의 저자와 그 일행은 도쿄를 떠나 시모노세키에서 배를 타고 부산과 목포를 거쳐 제주도에 도착하여 제주도 산간지역에 이미 설치되어 있던 세군데의 표고버섯재배장을 둘러보고 표고버섯 재배실험을 한 후 수확한 표고버섯을 가지고 제주도를 떠나 일본으로 되돌아왔다. 저자는 여행 중 보고 경험한 것들은 물론, 제주도의 산천과 함께 표고버섯 재배과정을 자세히 그림과 글로 기록하였다. 대한제국이 공식적으로 일본의 식민지가 되기 직전 일본의 소자본가들이 식민경영에 뛰어드는 구체적인 사례를 보여주는 자료이면서 당시 제주도의 생활상과 민속연구에도 도움을 줄 수 있는 보기드문 자료이다.

Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945
Eckert CJ. Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2016. Website Link

 

For South Koreans, the twenty years from the early 1960s to late 1970s were the best and worst of times—a period of unprecedented economic growth and of political oppression that deepened as prosperity spread. In this masterly account, Carter J. Eckert finds the roots of South Korea’s dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country’s long history of militarization—a history personified in South Korea’s paramount leader, Park Chung Hee.

The first volume of a comprehensive two-part history, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945 reveals how the foundations of the dynamic but strongly authoritarian Korean state that emerged under Park were laid during the period of Japanese occupation. As a cadet in the Manchurian Military Academy, Park and his fellow officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army’s ethos of victory at all costs and absolute obedience to authority. Japanese military culture decisively shaped Korea’s postwar generation of military leaders. When Park seized power in an army coup in 1961, he brought this training and mentality to bear on the project of Korean modernization.

Korean society under Park exuded a distinctively martial character, Eckert shows. Its hallmarks included the belief that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis; that a central authority should plan and monitor the country’s economic system; that the Korean people’s “can do” spirit would allow them to overcome any challenge; and that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society, reserving the right to use violence to maintain order.

Carter J. Eckert is Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History at Harvard University.

 

Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea's Democracy Movement, 1970-1979
Chang PY. Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea's Democracy Movement, 1970-1979. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press; 2015 pp. 312. Website

1970s South Korea is characterized by many as the "dark age for democracy." Most scholarship on South Korea's democracy movement and civil society has focused on the "student revolution" in 1960 and the large protest cycles in the 1980s which were followed by Korea's transition to democracy in 1987. But in his groundbreaking work of political and social history of 1970s South Korea, Paul Chang highlights the importance of understanding the emergence and evolution of the democracy movement in this oft-ignored decade.

Protest Dialectics journeys back to 1970s South Korea and provides readers with an in-depth understanding of the numerous events in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for the 1980s democracy movement and the formation of civil society today. Chang shows how the narrative of the 1970s as democracy's "dark age" obfuscates the important material and discursive developments that became the foundations for the movement in the 1980s which, in turn, paved the way for the institutionalization of civil society after transition in 1987. To correct for these oversights in the literature and to better understand the origins of South Korea's vibrant social movement sector this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the emergence and evolution of the democracy movement in the 1970s.

Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea
Kim SJ, Kim J. Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press; 2014 pp. 280. Publisher's Version

This collection presents and analyzes inquest records that tell the stories of ordinary Korean people under the Choson court (1392-1910). Extending the study of this period, usually limited to elites, into the realm of everyday life, each inquest record includes a detailed postmortem examination and features testimony from everyone directly or indirectly related to the incident. The result is an amazingly vivid, colloquial account of the vibrant, multifaceted societal and legal cultures of early modern Korea. Sun Joo Kim is the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History at Harvard University. Jungwon Kim is assistant professor of Korean history at Columbia University. “This book provides an extremely rare view into social interactions among people of quite different classes in Choson Korea. Points of interest abound.”—Robert E. Hegel, Washington University, St. Louis "This is an important contribution that significantly advances our knowledge of nineteenth-century Korean legal history. The translated cases shine by being able to introduce daily struggles of nonelites and illustrate the complex dynamics of the judiciary system during the last century of the Choson dynasty." - Jisoo Kim, George Washington University

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