Humanism, Empire, and Nation

Essays featuring twentieth-century Korean thought on literature and culture.

Faced with dramatic social and political changes, Korean writers of the twentieth century—writing in the context of Japanese imperialism, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War era—explored many pressing questions about modern life: What is the relationship between literature and society? How can intellectual concepts be used politically, for good or ill? What are the differences between Eastern and Western cultures?

The essays in this collection, originally published between 1933 and 1957, explore these and other questions through varying lenses, including liberal humanism, socialism, fascism, and an early form of North Korea's Juche thought. Featuring works by Paik Ch'ol, So Insik, Om Hosok, and Ch'oe Chaeso, the volume highlights the diversity of twentieth-century Korean thought, its developments during periods of upheaval, and its engagement with ideas of modernity that were being shared around the world.

This volume contains discussion of writers such as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, Maxim Gorky, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Karl Marx, Walter Pater, Plato, Marcel Proust, Yi Kwangsu, and Yi Sang; movements, schools of thought, and literary styles such as English Romanticism, European modernism, German idealism, the Kyoto school of philosophy, Marxism, naturalism, the New Tendency Group, nihilism, socialist realism, and tendentious literature; traditions such as Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism; and the sociopolitical and economic formation known as East Asian Community.