Korean Literature between East Asia and Europe

This article explores the historical shifts in Korean conceptions of national identity, national language, and national literature. For much of Korea’s history, it did not possess a written language, and nearly all writings were composed in literary Chinese. Although the Korean writing system was invented in 1443 and promulgated in 1445, it enjoyed relatively little official usage until the close of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, following the Japanese annexation of Korean in 1910, certain Korean intellectuals simultaneously attempted to preserve a Korean ethnic nation where no Korean political state existed, and to take stock of the immense changes the peninsula had undergone in nearly all spheres of life. Those involved in literature were faced with the task of forging a new definition of Korean literature in a world that now demanded a correspondence among territory, blood, and language. It was language, specifically written language, however, that proved the most recalcitrant to this new nationalist conception of “Korean-ness.” Following Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945, a somewhat understandably xenophobic monolingualism briefly engulfed a nation in which bilingualism had been the norm for millenia. After little more than a single generation, however, Korea today has returned to where it had been for over a thousand years before: bilingualism is the norm for educated Koreans, and Korean literature is once again beginning to reflect that fact. Today young Korean writers are producing Korean literature in the English language. This is not a truly new development. Rather, when viewed in the context of Korean history as a whole, these writers are the heirs to a long and proud tradition of bilingualism and biculturalism in Korea.