The Center for Korean Research and Columbia University Press Korean Studies Book Initiative
The Center for Korean Research at Columbia University and Columbia University Press have partnered to create a Korean studies book initiative. A $10,000 subvention is awarded each year on a competitive basis to an author who has secured a contract from Columbia University Press for an outstanding Korea-related book in any academic discipline and covering any time period. Applications for the subvention are not required. Columbia University Press will consider all Korea-related manuscripts under contract in a given year for the award. The designation “A Center for Korean Research Book” will appear on the title page of the book, along with acknowledgment of the funding source on the copyright page.
Those interested in publishing in the series should send to Christine Dunbar, editor at Columbia University Press (cd2654@columbia.edu), a proposal containing a brief description of the content and focus of the book, a table of contents or chapter outline, literature review and market analysis, and professional information about the author, including previous publications.
The CKR/CUP Book Series is supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2016-OLU-2250006).
Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday
Ksenia Chizhova
Date of Publication: January 2021
Abstract:
The lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. These vast works unfold genealogically, tracing the lives of several generations. New storylines, often written by different authors, follow the lives of the descendants of the original protagonists, offering encyclopedic accounts of domestic life cycles and relationships. Elite women transcribed these texts—which span tens and even hundreds of volumes—in exquisite vernacular calligraphy and transmitted them through generations in their families.
In Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea, Ksenia Chizhova foregrounds lineage novels and the domestic world in which they were read to recast the social transformations of Chosŏn Korea and the development of early modern Korean literature. She demonstrates women’s centrality to the creation of elite vernacular Korean practices and argues that domestic-focused genres such as lineage novels, commemorative texts, and family tales shed light on the emergence and perpetuation of patrilineal kinship structures. The proliferation of kinship narratives in the Chosŏn period illuminates the changing affective contours of familial bonds and how the domestic space functioned as a site of their everyday experience. Drawing on an archive of women-centered elite vernacular texts, Chizhova uncovers the structures of feelings and conceptions of selfhood beneath official genealogies and legal statutes, revealing that kinship is as much a textual as a social practice. Shedding new light on Korean literary history and questions of Korea’s modernity, this book also offers a broader lens on the global rise of the novel.
Si Nae Park
Date of Publication: July 2020
As the political, economic, and cultural center of Chosŏn Korea, eighteenth-century Seoul epitomized a society in flux: It was a bustling, worldly metropolis into which things and people from all over the country flowed. In this book, Si Nae Park examines how the culture of Chosŏn Seoul gave rise to a new vernacular narrative form that was evocative of the spoken and written Korean language of the time.
The first book in English on the origins of yadam, The Korean Vernacular Story combines historical insight, textual studies, and the history of the book. By highlighting the role of negotiation with Literary Sinitic and sinographic writing, it challenges the script-focused understanding of Korean language and literature.
Date of Publication: November 2018
Abstract:
In search of national unity and state control in the decade following the Korean War, North Korea turned to labor. Mandating rapid industrial growth, the government stressed order and consistency in everyday life at both work and home. In Heroes and Toilers, Cheehyung Harrison Kim offers an unprecedented account of life and labor in postwar North Korea that brings together the roles of governance and resistance.
First Title in the Series
Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea
Christina Yi
Date of publication: March 6, 2018
Abstract:
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion. Acquisition of Taiwan occurred in 1895, soon followed by the annexation of Korea in 1910. Assimilation policies in Japan’s colonies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender to the Allied powers in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea’s liberation, Korean was claimed as the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these same texts were excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders.
Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s, exploring the sociopolitical factors involved in the production and consumption of these works. She then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia.