Content area
Full text
Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again, by Kelly Y. Jeong. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011. 156 pages. $55 cloth.
Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema: Modernity Arrives Again is a study of South Korea's unprecedented experience of modernization, with a focus on the literature (and also in the films in the 1960s) that portrayed the historical traumas of colonialism in the 1930s, decolonization in the 1940s, the Korean War in the 1950s, and uneven economic development in the 1960s. The book includes the introduction of modernity's paradox, trauma, and multiplicity into Korean life; gender issues and nationalism or modernity depicted in the literature of the period from the 1920s to the 1960s; and nation rebuilding, masculinity, and decolonization depicted in the postwar South Korean cinema of the 1960s in films like The Coachman and The Stray Bullet.
The author starts with the umbrella topic of modernity, asking ''What is modernity?'' The author claims that the content and context of modernity in Korea changes depending on the different historical period in question. Also, modernity is like a double-edged sword in Korea, promising freedom, as well as gender or social equality, but creating destabilization and confusion of existing hierarchies and truths. Korea's modernity started with colonization, arriving slowly and filtered through Japan even before Japan's...