The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature

Heekyoung Cho

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367348496
• eBook ISBN: 9781000539646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature consists of 35 chapters written by leaders in the field, who explore significant topics and who have pioneered innovative approaches. The collection highlights the most dynamic current scholarship on Korean literature, presenting rigorous literary analysis, interdisciplinary methodologies, and transregional thinking so as to provide a valuable and inspiring resource for researchers and students alike. This Companion has particular significance as the most extensive collection to date of English-language articles on Korean literature; it both offers a thorough intellectual engagement with current scholarship and addresses a broad range of topics and time periods, from premodern to contemporary. It will contribute to an understanding of literature as part of a broad sociocultural process that aims to put the field into conversation with other fields of study in the humanities and social sciences.

While presenting rigorous and innovative academic research that will be useful to graduate students and researchers, the chapters in the collection are written to be accessible to the average upper-level undergraduate student and include only minimal use of academic jargon. In an effort to provide substantially helpful material for researching, teaching, and learning Korean literature, this Companion includes as an appendix an extensive list of English translations of Korean literature.

PART I Premodern and Early Modern Korean Literature

SECTION I Manuscript Culture, Materiality, Performativity

1 MANUSCRIPT, NOT PRINT, IN THE BOOK WORLD OF CHOSŎN KOREA (1392–1910)

Si Nae Park

DOI: 10.4324/9780429328411-4

Introduction

Two pieces of information commonly populate descriptions of the book in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910): (1) in 1377 Korea produced the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type that it invented, thus predating Johannes Gutenberg’s (c. 1400–1468) 1455 movable metal type printing press in Europe; and (2) the late advent of commercial private publishing, despite the early blossoming of print. Concurrent with such details focused on print has been an emphasis on the vibrancy of manuscripts—books written by hand. William Skillend (1926–2010) tells us that Korea “boasts the oldest piece of printing in the world, as well as the oldest text printed in movable type,” but that “manuscript copying had won over both” (1989:157). More recently, Boudewijn Walraven stresses that manuscripts were a “viable book form” (2007:238). These statements address the disproportionate representation of printed books and manuscripts in the study of the book world of premodern Korea. Taking its cue from these previous observations, this chapter examines the important yet neglected contributions of manuscripts. It seeks to build a more balanced understanding of the Chosŏn book world through relativizing the current print-biased generalizations and calling for a historical reconstruction of the affordances of Chosŏn manuscripts. It asserts that greater attention to manuscripts and the entanglements between print and manuscript holds the key to the understanding of how people created, read, and circulated books in premodern Korea.

The chapter has three components. It first revisits the discursive context of Maurice Courant’s (1865–1935) Korean Bibliography (Bibliographie Coréenne, 1894–1897) as the first study to privilege Korea’s printing technology and marginalize manuscripts (Courant 1894–1896). Next, it highlights recent research that has expanded the understanding of how scribal publishing and copying of books undergirded the Chosŏn culture of texts and engages with comparative research on the book worlds of East Asia and Europe in order to outline what print-biased generalizations perpetuate the continued underappreciation of manuscripts.¹ Finally, with an eye toward accumulating greater information about the affordances of Chosŏn manuscripts, it fleshes out how surviving manuscripts inform us about a text’s interpretive horizons and its reception context by focusing on The Small Chest of Collected Writings of a Guest from Chosŏn (Han’gaek kŏnyŏn chip, 1776) and The Record Manifesting Goodness and Inspiring Righteousness (Ch’angsŏn kamŭirok, ca. late seventeenth century). In closing, the chapter briefly contemplates Chosŏn manuscripts in the digital environment.

1. This chapter thus does not discuss scribal marginalia on printed texts—e.g., Glomb (2017).

Manuscripts as an Aberration in Korean Bibliography

A three-volume, 2,200-page tome that describes, in varying levels of detail, 3,240 titles, Courant’s Korean Bibliography (hereafter Bibliography) is well-known as the first work to praise Korea’s printing technology. Less known is the discursive context within which Courant lodges his praise of Korean printing through a Europe- and print-centered lens. According to the “Introduction,” Courant’s research seeks to answer the following question: why is it that many foreigners hardly know “if there is such a thing as Korean literature?”² He opens with a vivid portrayal of what kinds of books a foreign visitor might spot in Korea. There are books that could easily be mistaken as Chinese books, some of which are beautifully printed books that are held in high esteem and whose transaction is handled with great care, while others are cheaply made printed books routinely on display along with sundry other goods such as tobacco. There are also cheaply made novels and songbooks written in the Korean script handled by book-lending businesses (sech’aekchŏm 貰冊店; Courant calls them “lending libraries”); these exist only in Seoul and nowhere else on the peninsula. Courant intends to complicate this picture by illustrating the wider spectrum of what constitutes Korean literature and giving detailed descriptions of Korean books and their physical condition.³

2. All quotes from Bibliography are based on an English translation by Bishop Trollop in Courant (1936), with slight modifications at times. 3. Courant examined books held abroad as a result of looting by foreign armies in the late nineteenth century (e.g., those held in the Bibliogthéque Nationale), as well as books in Korea, including books held by the Musée Guimet originating from the personal collection of Collin de Plancy (1853–1924), who inspired Cou-rant’s scholarship, the British Museum, the College of Living Oriental Languages in Seoul, and titles found in George von der Gabelentz’s (1840–1893) catalogue of Korean books. Courant regretted that he did not have access to books in St. Petersburg or Japan. After he left Korea, people such as Archbishop Gustave-Charles-Marie Mutel (1854–1933) supplied Courant with further research materials.

Bibliography, however, dismissively concludes that the essence of Korean literature is an “imitation of China.” There are “few original works” in Korea, and its literature is “imbued with Chinese spirit and often straightforward imitation.” Courant lived in an era during which Korea’s preexisting inscriptional ecology was being drastically reconfigured to center around the Korean language and script—now the national language and national script—in the process of deliberately decentering from China (Schmid 2002). The fact that Koreans preferred to write by mastering the stylistic conventions of earlier Chinese texts and marshalling literary allusions to the classics and canonical works written in literary Sinitic did not lead Courant to discover the translocal literary universe that extended across most of pre-twentieth-century East Asia and what scholars now call the Sinographic Cosmopolis (King 2014) or Sinographic Sphere (Denecke 2017). The teleology of the nation state of the time made little room for a historicized understanding of the politics of language in this realm as it hinged on the prestige of literary Sinitic, a written medium largely divorced from speech, and sinographic writing (i.e., the use of sinographs) held a privileged status as the language of the classics and canon and, hence, the literary medium par excellence, vis-à-vis the written vernacular (King 2015; Kornicki 2018).

Importantly, it is in this context of seeing impoverishment in Korean literature that Courant praises Korea’s movable metal type printing technology and books printed using this method. Korea’s printing technology, along with the Korean alphabet, embodied the “intelligence of the Korean mind.” Using geographic determinism, Courant laments that Korea’s “arrested social progress” was due to its location “sandwiched between two powerful countries” in East Asia (read “not in Europe”), which made it a “poor country with difficult communications” and subject to foreigners’ “pillaging and enslavement.” The splendor of Korea’s printing technology symbolized Korea’s once glorious past and its unfulfilled potential.

Moreover, Bibliography’s impressive coverage notwithstanding, Courant could not examine all Korean books, nor could his description be free of his privileging of certain books over others. The best represented types of books were those that Europeans like Courant himself or Chosŏn people at that time valued highly (e.g., books issued by the state). Courant also paid close attention to block-printed novels. While Chosŏn literati disdained these books, Europeans deemed them exotic, possibly because woodcut had been associated primarily with illustrations in Europe (Sŏ Hyeŭn 2019). This politics of representation is evident in Bibliography: many titles are simply marked as “cité par le” [(mentioned in) such-and-such book], and there are many books introduced by their titles only.

Between books he could and could not examine, Courant noticed a curious aspect of Korea’s book culture: the ubiquity of manuscripts. Koreans’ persistent use of manuscripts puzzled him, because he anticipated that its printing technology would have dominated textual circulation: “in spite of the early use of printing and the perfection to which [Korea] attained, one often finds [manuscripts].” He speculates that Koreans relied on manuscripts, unlike in China or Japan (and certainly unlike in Europe), because “the serious printed books” were too costly for ordinary literati. This description is focused on the male elite’s scribal tradition of duplicating printed books for perusal, and as such it does not apply to the elaborately produced, high-quality manuscripts issued by the court (e.g., royal protocols called Ŭigwe) or the commercially circulating manuscripts of vernacular novels and songbooks (despite the fact that he was familiar with them and that Bibliography discusses them).

Courant suspects that the role of manuscripts in Korea must have been “necessarily quite different from that which [they] played in Europe,” because Korea is “a country where printing has been in use for so long.” However, his thought process stops here. He regarded the book world of Europe, where publishing had been typically equated with commercial printing, as the norm and telos for the development of the book elsewhere. The combination of Korea’s long use of a highly developed printing technology (which happened to be of the movable metal type kind, like in Europe, albeit one that relied on a different mechanism from the printing press) and its continued deployment of manuscripts for textual circulation thus remains a peculiar aberration for Courant, a marginal trait undeserving of serious investigation.

The idea of the superiority of Korean movable metal type printing emerged at the intersection of Courant’s sympathy for the precarious plight of the Korean nation in the mid-1890s, his teleological assessment of the book world of Korea using the trajectory of the book in Europe as a yardstick, and his dismissal of the manuscript-heavy nature of the Chosŏn ecology of books. While Courant’s observation is only one among many who examined the book in premodern Korea around the early twentieth century (King 2012; Fujimoto 2011:9–12; Michael Kim 2004:10–17), the print-centered view of Korea’s book culture embedded in Bibliography was to persist in later historical assessments of the book world of Chosŏn Korea and the neglect of manuscripts in it.

The Chosŏn Book World Beyond Print

Since the publication of Bibliography, research on Korea’s book world and patterns of textual production and circulation has appeared across multiple areas of study. Most of this research is microscopic, based on investigations into the circulation context of a particular text or a corpus of texts. A smaller number of macroscopic studies address the history of the book in Korea or premodern Korean book culture more broadly. This section attempts a state-of-the-field kind of discussion to illustrate a dis-juncture between these two levels of scholarship. While preliminary and selective, the section lends us a sense that the former kind emphasizes the co-presence of printed books and manuscripts and print-manuscript interplays, while the latter kind tends to narrowly focus on the history of printing.

A vibrant area of study for research on manuscripts has been the circulation of vernacular novels (ŏnmun sosŏl)—late Chosŏn fictional narratives written entirely in the vern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration
• Introduction—Redefined and Challenged: Anthologizing Korean Literary Studies
• Part I Premodern and Early Modern Korean Literature
• Part II Modernity and the Colonial Period
• Part III Liberation and Contemporary Korean Literature
• Part IV Queer Studies, World Literature, the Digital Humanities
• Appendix: A Comprehensive List of English Translations of Korean Literature
• Index