Texts as Contracts in the Political Economy of Korea, 1896-1926

This study explores a process of negotiated political and economic dispossession in Korea from the late 1890s, when ideas of modernization first began to invoke an implicit relationship with the West, to the 1919 Declaration of Korean Independence. It examines the middle stages of the political dispossession, a process that eventually framed the discourse characteristic of the poems of Manhae Han Yong-un, Sowŏl Kim Chŏng-shik, and other Korean writers of the 1920s—poems in which little or nothing is ever stated about the actual conditions of life in Korea at the time, and in which the addressee is characteristically a person who is loved but absent.