Figuring Korean Futures : Children’s Literature in Modern Korea / Dafna Zur.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zur, Dafna, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Children's periodicals, Korean--History--20th century.

Children's periodicals, Korean.

Children's literature, Korean--History and criticism.

Children's literature, Korean.

Korean periodicals--History--20th century.

Korean periodicals.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations (black and white)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. Starting in the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak directly to a child-reader. This child audience was perceived as unique because of a new concept: the child-heart, the perception that the child's body and mind were transparent and knowable, and that they rested on the threshold of culture. This privileged location enabled writers and illustrators, educators and psychologists, intellectual elite and laypersons to envision the child as a powerful antidote to the present and as an uplifting metaphor of colonial Korea's future. Reading children's periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, Dafna Zur argues that the figure of the child was particularly favorable to the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization. She demonstrates the ways in which Korean children's literature builds on a trajectory that begins with the child as an organic part of nature, and ends, in the post-colonial era, with the child as the primary agent of control of nature. Figuring Korean Futures reveals the complex ways in which the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Child and Modern Korea

1. The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea

2. Figuring the Child-Heart

3. Writing the Language of the Child-Heart

4. The Proletarian Child Strikes Back

5. Playing War in Late Colonial Korea

6. Liberating the Child-Heart

Epilogue: The Turn to Science in Postwar North and South Korea

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9781503603110

1503603113

OCLC:

1178770260