EVENT CANCELLED / The Novel in Transition: Gender and Literature in Early Colonial Korea

Unfortunately, we regret to inform everyone that this event has been cancelled in light of the current COVID-19 situation.
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With Jooyeon Rhee, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University
Having been marginalized from the literature-proper sphere of Confucian elite culture, the novel began to transform significantly at the turn of the twentieth century in Korea. Jooyeon Rhee investigates selected novels in transition in this book including both translated and creative fiction works that were produced under the spell of civilization and the Enlightenment. Rhee places the transformation of the novel in the complex nexus of civilization discourses, transnational literary forces, and modern print media to show how they became a driving force behind the development of modern Korean literature. Gender is an analytical category central to this book since it became an important epistemological ground on which to define the Korean nation and modernity in literature at the time, and because the novel was one of the most effective technologies that mediated and populated knowledge about gender roles and relations. The Novel in Transition: Gender and Literature in Early Colonial Korea is part of the Cornell East Asia Series and was published by Cornell University Press in 2019.
Jooyeon Rhee is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University who specializes in modern Korean literature and culture. Her main research deals with Korean popular literature with particular emphasis on transnational literary exchanges and interactions. Currently, she is working on book-length research on cultural imaginations of crime and deviance manifested in Korean detective fiction of late colonial Korea. Her other research interests include diasporic art and literature, popular culture, and representations of gender and sexuality in Korean film and media.