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Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan
Series: - East Asian Comparative Literature and Culture, Volume: 12
Author:
Urban Modernities reconsiders Japanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan through a relational study of modernist literature and urban aesthetics from the late colonial period. By charting intra-Asian and transregional circulations of writers, ideas, and texts, it reevaluates the dominant narrative in current scholarship that presents Korea and Taiwan as having vastly different responses to and experiences of Japanese colonialism. By comparing representations of various colonial spaces ranging from the nation, the streets, department stores, and print spaces to underscore the shared experiences of the quotidian and the poetic, Jina E. Kim shows how the culture of urban modernity enlivened networks of connections between the colonies and destabilized the metropole-colony relationship, thus also contributing to the broader formation of global modernism.
Jina E. Kim, Ph.D. University of Washington, is Assistant Professor of Korean Literature and Culture at the University of Oregon.
"Jina E. Kim’s
Urban Modernities in Colonial Korea and Taiwan is a remarkable addition to the growing field of intra-Asian comparative literature, as well as to the fields of Korean literature and Taiwanese literature, to studies of imperial and postcolonial East Asia, and to scholarship on global modernisms...
Urban Modernities brims with insights. It is a timely monograph that will be of great interest to scholars and students in a range of fields. This book is well-researched and clearly written. It skillfully intertwines Western theory while at the same time eschewing jargon. Drawing from a range of scholarship on East Asia in English, Chinese, and Korean, Kim’s book advances multiple fields, including the still relatively young field of modern intra-Asian comparative literature. It will almost certainly inspire significant transnational and transregional scholarship." - Karen L. Thornber,
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 81, Numbers 1&2, 2021, pp. 364-370.
"Jina Kim’s colony-centered approach and the skillful manner in which she combines a wealth of evidence and theory to collapse long-accepted dichotomies between metropole and colony, between advanced and back-ward, are two of the main reasons to recommend this book. A third is the rich texture of everyday life in Korea and Taiwan during the 1920s and 1930s that emerges from her discussions of her literary examples." - Evan N. Dawley, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 47, Number 2 (Summer 2021), pp.482-487.
"Jina Kim’s colony-centered approach and the skillful manner in which she combines a wealth of evidence and theory to collapse long-accepted dichotomies between metropole and colony, between advanced and back-ward, are two of the main reasons to recommend this book. A third is the rich texture of everyday life in Korea and Taiwan during the 1920s and 1930s that emerges from her discussions of her literary examples." - Evan N. Dawley, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 47, Number 2 (Summer 2021), pp.482-487.
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Introduction: Text and the City
1 Discovering Modernity: Sketching Urban Landscapes of Home and Abroad
2 Linguistic Modernity: Modernism on the Streets and the Poetry of Kim Kirim and Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang
3 Consuming Modernity: Department Stores and Modernist Fiction
4 Visual Modernity: Screening Women in Colonial Media
Postscript: Contemporary Urban Life in Seoul and Taipei
Appendix: New Words
Bibliography
List of Figures
Introduction: Text and the City
1 Discovering Modernity: Sketching Urban Landscapes of Home and Abroad
2 Linguistic Modernity: Modernism on the Streets and the Poetry of Kim Kirim and Yang Ch’ih-ch’ang
3 Consuming Modernity: Department Stores and Modernist Fiction
4 Visual Modernity: Screening Women in Colonial Media
Postscript: Contemporary Urban Life in Seoul and Taipei
Appendix: New Words
Bibliography
All interested in critical studies of East Asia’s intra-regional and transcultural connections, and anyone concerned with comparative Korean and Taiwanese modern cultural history, literature, and urban studies.