Joanne Miyang Cho

Lee M. Roberts

Since the late 1990s, South Korean cultural products such as pop music, TV drama, and film have shaped the country’s image around the world. This book explores these three internationally best-known media of the Korean Wave global phenomenon, along with a less commonly featured aspect, K-literature. Iconic images of South Korea today include stylish music groups like BTS and Blackpink, appealing dramas, and a range of films and digital comics (manhwa). Alongside associations with glitz and glamor are darker impressions: continuing political division, malaise over a war that never really ended. Korean Culture in the Global Age focuses on these and other facets of South Korea’s constantly changing international image to show how it has come to command worldwide attention. In recent years, readers in a growing number of languages have discovered the talent of South Korean authors through the efforts of countless translators. Showing developments in and occasional connections between themes in K-pop, K-drama, K-film, and K-literature, the book provides a more comprehensive view of contemporary South Korean culture. This volume will interest researchers and students of Korean Studies, Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, popular music, film studies, migration and diaspora studies, and world literature.

K-Pop, K-Drama, K-Film, and K-Literature

Korean Culture in the Global Age

This book examines the history of the German-Korean relationship from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the nations’ varied encounters with each other during the last years of the Yi dynasty, the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era. With essays from a range of internationally respected scholars, this collection moves between history, diplomacy, politics, education, migration, literature, cinema, and architecture to uncover historical and cultural intersections between Germany and Korea. Each nation has navigated the challenges of modernity in different ways, and yet traditional East-West dichotomies belie the deeper affinities between them. This book points to those affinities, focusing in particular on the past and present internal divisions that perhaps make Germany and Korea as similar as Germany and Japan.

Affinity in Culture and Politics Since the 1880s

Transnational Encounters between Germany and Korea

Sang Hwan Seong

Contrary to the image of Korea as a largely self-contained country until its economy became global during the 1990s, this book shows that transnationalism has firmly been part of modern Korea’s national experience throughout its existence. The volume portrays Korea’s frequent transnational entanglements with other nations in East Asia and the West from the start of its annexation into the Empire of Japan in 1910 to the present day. It explores how modern Korea negotiated its complicated colonial relations with imperial Japan and its political and economic relations with the West in meeting the challenges of the globalized world. Early chapters cover the origins of Korea’s democratic republicanism among Korean immigrants in the United States, the Royal-Dutch oil industry in Korea, military hygiene and sex workers, and prisons in the Japanese empire. From the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, the book probes Cold War politics between Korea and Europe, transnational Korean communities in China, Japan, the Russian Far East, and the West, and ethnic Korean returnees from the Russian Far East. With contributions from leading international scholars, this collection’s attention to modern Korean history, economy, gender studies, and migration is ideal for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates.

Lee M. Roberts

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