The Logic and Practice of Literary Nationalism

The Korean original of this article was first published in March 1988 and in December of that year won the Seoul Cultural Arts Criticism Award, sponsored by the Seoul shinmun newspaper. The author is Professor of Korean Literature at Seoul National University and a frequently published literary critic. He is also Editor of Munhak sasang (Literary thought) magazine. In this article, he accounts for the turn-of-the-century roots of Korean literary nationalism and sketches its development into the present. He argues that the nationalist literature of 1970s should be recognized as a distinct period in contemporary literary history and critically traces the emergence of literary populism in the 1980s.