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Reviewed by:
  • On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea
  • Bruce Fulton
On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea translated by Sunyoung Park in collaboration with Jefferson J. A. Gatrall. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2010. 284 pp. $35.00 (cloth)

On the Eve of the Uprising consists of translations of half a dozen stories published in Korea between 1924 and 1946, together with an introduction and glossary [End Page 227] by University of Southern California professor Sunyoung Park. This is a significant work combining six important stories and their authors. However, Professor Park states in her introduction that “literary works from the colonial period (1910–45) have for long been scarce in English translation” (p. xi). Actually, the earliest English translations of modern Korean fiction were primarily of stories from the colonial period.1 More accurately, it is three of the authors in On the Eve of the Uprising—Pak T’aewŏn, Kim Namch’ŏn, and Yi T’aejun—who have long been scarce in English translation, owing primarily to their status as wŏlbuk chakka (went-north [North Korea] writers), and consequently, their difficulty of access until the democratization of the political process in South Korea in the late 1980s. This dearth is particularly unfortunate in the case of Yi, one of the finest modern Korean prose stylists.2 It is also good to have Pak’s “Kubo” story available in translation, complete with the original artwork of Yi Sang. Moreover, there is, in this anthology, a sufficient variety in voice and style to reflect the various currents—realism, romanticism, confessional writing, writing that emphasizes class conflict, small-scale versions of novels of manners—that come together in the stream of fiction writing from the colonial period.

How successful this volume will be in the classroom, not to mention with a wider audience, is another question. Anecdotal evidence suggests that “Kubo” works well with students, but my students at the University of British Columbia find colonial period Korean fiction in general an especially hard read, and I find it significant that the Korean-dominant students among them report difficulty in reading works such as Yŏm Sangsŏp’s Samdae.3 One challenge is the large dose of confessional writing in all the stories except “Samnyong.” Granted such content gives us valuable insights into the dilemmas faced by Korean intellectuals during the colonial period, but for the pleasure of reading a well-told story, with a minimum of digressions, readers will have to look elsewhere. As works of literature I prefer the last two stories, but even here there is labored conceptualization (pp. 224–26, “Barley”) and excessive reportage of the contemporary state of affairs (pp. 265–73, “Before and After Liberation”). On the other hand, the preoccupation with the colonial period among many of our graduate students and younger Korean Studies colleagues since the 1990s should make Uprising a valuable resource for years to come.

Every reviewer of an anthology will have a wish list of suggestions, and I am no exception. First of all, women are not represented in On the Eve of the Uprising. They should be.4 It was only in the 1990s that English-language scholarship on modern Korean literature began to acknowledge the contributions of writers such as Kim Myŏngsun, Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi, Kim Wŏnju, Yi Sŏnhŭi, and Paek Sinae to colonial period fiction5; their voices need to be heard. Second, as important as the title story is in revealing the ambivalences within Korean intellectuals during the colonial period, its 100-plus pages might just as well have been filled to similar effect by a shorter piece by Yŏm Sangsŏp, along with stories by Hwang Sunwŏn, whose modernist work from the 1930s is rarely mentioned, Yi Sang, Yi [End Page 228] Kwangsu, and Ch’oe Myŏngik. Third, some readers may find the unvarnished misogyny in that story objectionable. Last, the translated title of the Pak T’aewŏn story perpetuates a longstanding inaccuracy in terminology. Kubo, the protagonist, is not a novelist; he is a writer, specifically a fiction...

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