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  • Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur
  • Jin-kyung Lee
Figuring Korean Futures: Children's Literature in Modern Korea by Dafna Zur. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 286. $65.00 cloth, $65.00 e-book.

Children's literature, as explored in Figuring Korean Futures, represents a point of rich and fascinating convergence of multiple issues, as well as an intersection of three key axes: colonization, modernization, and nation building. The book covers an impressive expanse of time from the 1900s to the immediate post-Liberation era in its six main chapters, while also adding its perspective on North and South Korea after the Korean War in the epilogue. The topic of children's literature was by and large marginalized in the ideologically divided and contentious literary historiography through the tumultuous decades of authoritarian rule. Figuring Korean Futures is the first English-language monograph to treat the topic of children's literature and examine the child as a symbol of Korean modernity.

I speculate that tongsim 童心 (child-heart), as well as the figure of the child who is understood to be in possession of it, has been understudied since it became a naturalized notion in colonial Korea. The book's most essential contribution is that it historicizes and deconstructs—it elucidates the ways in which the discovery and (re)construction of the child were intertwined with the plural, variant, and historical (including colonial and postcolonial) modernities of Korea. The child as represented in children's literature, made visible for the first time with the advent of (colonial) modernity, becomes, in Zur's book, not only a symbolic figure through which the series of modern ideologies are reflected and refracted. More importantly, the child took on the function of actively reshaping and transforming the imported [End Page 300] ideological discourses. In a way, the child embodies the very particularities in Korea's experience of the globalized modular modernity. Tongsim is the key concept upon which modern Korea's social and cultural movement to recognize children's human rights and welfare is premised. Zur carefully and lucidly probes into the multifariousness of the concept, as it undergoes a series of metamorphoses in relation to the historical vicissitudes of Korea's modernity. Zur's book shows, in an introduction, six chapters, and a substantial epilogue, the expansiveness and malleability of the concept of tongsim and the recurring reinventions of the child. Figuring Korean Futures rewrites the historiographical arc of Korea's modernity by foregrounding the inextricability of modernity and the child. Zur examines the child as a profound icon of the modern ethnos of the Korean peninsula, as the child represents infinite plasticity and multiplicitous futurity.

Chapter 1, "The Youth Magazine in Early Colonial Korea," explores how the three-way connections among the new notion of youth or children, print culture, and the modern ethnos laid the foundation for colonial modernity on the Korean peninsula. It focuses on Ch'oe Nam-sŏn's 최남선 (1890–1957) pioneering magazines, Sonyŏn 소년 (Youth) and Sin Taehan 신대한 (New Korean youth). One of Ch'oe's main reformist goals was to detach children from the traditional kinship network and to connect them directly to the modern ethnonation. Zur demonstrates how key dimensions of the emergent print culture—such as visuality (photographs and illustrations in the magazines), mass production, and mass education of the readership—were closely tied to Ch'oe's efforts to bring forth a new Korea as a modern ethnos. In the magazines, the images and discourses on a variety of issues and topics reimagine and reconceptualize children and youth as sea adventurers and frontiersmen, who are connected directly to the urgent issues of survival and national strengthening a la social Darwinism. This chapter points to the ways in which children as a specific social group came to be separated out from the larger category and vaguer notion of youth. Zur thus establishes for the reader the fundamental linkage between the child and the revolutionary ideological shift that involved a new orientation toward futurity, the capitalist frontier spirit, and adventurism.

Chapter 2, "Figuring the Child-Heart," probes into tongsim, a central concept in the modern...

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