This is a comprehensive narrative history of Korean literature. It provides a wealth of information for scholars, students and lovers of literature. Combining both history and criticism the study reflects the latest scholarship and offers a systematic account of the development of all genres. Consisting of twenty-five chapters, it covers twentieth-century poetry, fiction by women and the literature of North Korea. This is a major contribution to the field and a study that will stand for many years as the primary resource for studying Korean literature.
As Korea has developed and modernized, music has come to play a central role as a symbol of national identity. Nationalism has been stage managed by scholars, journalists and the state, as music genres have been documented, preserved and promoted as 'Intangible Cultural Properties'. In this book, Keith Howard documents court music and dance, Confucian and shaman ritual music, folksongs, the professional folk-art genres of p'ansori and sanjo and more. An accompanying CD illustrates many of the music genres considered, featuring many master musicians including some who have now died.
A comprehensive and authoritative single-volume reference work on the theatre arts of Asia-Oceania. Nine expert scholars provide entries on performance in twenty countries from Pakistan in the west, through India and Southeast Asia to China, Japan and Korea in the east. An introductory pan-Asian essay explores basic themes - they include ritual, dance, puppetry, training, performance and masks. The national entries concentrate on the historical development of theatre in each country, followed by entries on the major theatre forms, and articles on playwrights, actors and directors. The entries are accompanied by rare photographs and helpful reading lists.
The minjung (people's) movement stood at the forefront of the June 1987 nationwide tide that swept away the military in South Korea and opened up space for relatively democratic politics, a more responsible economy, and new directions in culture. This volume is the first in English to grapple specifically with the nature of a national development that lies at the center of the last three decades of tumult and change in South Korea.
A translation of the contents of the manual used for the masked dance of Korea. Readers will delight in the wit and liveliness of these dramas that depict human errors as well as the redeeming virtues of social bonds."...a pioneering collection of Korean mask-dance and puppet plays... a fine introduction to the traditional vernacular Korean theater..."--Choice
Presence Through Sound narrates and analyses, through a range of case studies on selected musics of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Tibet, some of the many ways in which music and ‘place’ intersect and are interwoven with meaning in East Asia. It explores how place is significant to the many contexts in which music is made and experienced, especially in contemporary forms of longstanding traditions but also in other landscapes such as popular music and in the design of performance spaces. It shows how music creates and challenges borders, giving significance to geographical and cartographic spaces at local, national, and international levels, and illustrates how music is used to interpret relationships with ecology and environment, spirituality and community, and state and nation. The volume brings together scholars from Australia, China, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the UK, each of whom explores a specific genre or topic in depth. Each nuanced account finds distinct and at times different aspects to be significant but, in demonstrating the ability of music to mediate the construction of place and by showing how those who create and consume music use it to inhabit the intimate, and to project themselves out into their surroundings, each points to interconnections across the region and beyond with respect to perception, conception, expression, and interpretation. In Presence Through Sound, ethnomusicology meets anthropology, literature, linguistics, area studies, and – particularly pertinent to East Asia in the twenty-first century – local musicologies. The volume serves a broad academic readership and provides an essential resource for all those interested in East Asia.
Here for the first time are translations of five plays by Oh T'ae-sok, Korea's leading playwright and one of the most original dramatists and stage-directors working in Asia today. Drawing inspiration from both East and West and combining styles as disparate as ancient Korean masked dance-drama and contemporary avant-garde theater, these plays range from raucous comedy to historical tragedy, from explorations of the impact of the Korean War to bitter satires of modern Korean life. A stunning visual storyteller, Oh mines Korea's cultural and theatrical traditions--not to preserve them but to interrogate them in light of present social conditions and to reconstruct a new theatrical form that challenges both old and current conventions alike. His metacultural theater investigates "Koreaness" from the perspectives of many different cultures, while at the same time probing the meaning of culture itself.
"Korean Theatre: From Rituals to the Avant-Garde is the most comprehensive book on Korean theatre which covers from ancient rituals to the modern theatre. It is an essential book for anyone who is interested in theatre or Korean theatre . . . The research that went in to make this book possible can only be described as phenomenal." Alyssa Kim, Ph.D. Hankuk University of Foreign Studies "The book has a clear, understandable organization. Professor Cho’s prose is succinct, readable, and void of fashionable academic jargon. I find the chapter beginning-historical context very useful, most especially those surrounding and shaping Korean theatre since the ‘50s. The early chapters on masked-dance plays and puppet theatre provide important information about Korean culture and the later chapters on Madanggŭk and North Korean proletarian drama shed light on area little known or understood by Western students of Korea. This book promises to be a singular contribution to English-language materials on Korean theatre, one written by a scholar with an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject." Richard Nichols, Ph.D. Emeritus Professor of Theatre Pennsylvania State University
