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In this paper, I examine six modern retellings of the well-known Korean folktale, “Namukkun kwa sŏnnyŏ” (The Woodcutter and the Heavenly Maiden/Nymph). The ‘parodies’ I examine are Yun Hŭnggil’s short piece titled “Sŏnnyŏ ŭi nalgaeot” or “The fairy’s winged robes;” Kim Chi-wŏn’s 1992 short story, “Namukkun kwa sŏnnyŏ;”; Sim Sangdae’s 1990 retelling, titled “Namukkun ŭi ttŭt” (The woodcutter’s wish); Sŏ Ha-jin’s 1998 short story, “Namukkun kwa sŏnnyŏ;” Yun Yŏng-su’s 1998 short story, “Hanŭl yŏja [Sky woman]; and Angela Hur’s 2000 story in English, “Dust, light and water: Or, the woodcutter and the fairy, revisited.” The approach adopted is informed by theoretical work in intertextuality and ‘parody’ from North America, Europe and Korea. In particular, it also incorporates insights from feminist literary criticism and research on fairy tale parodies in Europe and North America. The paper concludes with a discussion of salient elements from the retellings, such as seduction/rape; clothing~disrobing~nakedness; nymph as mother/nymph as alien; male-female and husband-wife sexual politics; and filial piety vs. mother dependence from a Freudian perspective.

Throughout the Chosŏn dynasty, tributary expeditions to China provided Korean travelers with an opportunity to explore other cultures and ways of life. Pak Chi-wŏn, a Sirhak intellectual from the eighteenth century, recorded his detailed findings in his famous work “Yŏrha Ilgi.” In this work, Pak notes the ways in which exposure to China sheds light on many aspects of his own culture, including Korean society, economy, government and agriculture. Modernity has seen a great increase in the travel of Koreans overseas, particularly to China. Interestingly, many writers have chosen to follow in Pak Chi-wŏn’s footsteps. Writers such as Ch’oe In-hun, Yu Kŭm-ho and Ko Mi-suk have each written their own versions of Pak’s famous expedition, seen from a modern perspective. My paper will explore their literary journeys, and analyze how and why they choose to base themselves in Pak’s famous text. Finally, my paper will comment on the way in which each “version” illuminates the ways Korean writers in the past and present comment on issues such as ‘Koreanness’ and identity when faced with the foreign “Other.”

In this essay I discuss two canonical modern Korean fictional works, Yi Sang’s “Nalgae” (1936) and Kim Sŭngok’s “Sŏul, 1964-nyŏn kyŏul” (1965), and a recent parody of each—Kim Sŏkhŭi’s “Yi Sang ŭi nalgae” (1988) and Chŏn Chinu’s “Sŏul, 1986-nyŏn yŏrŭm” (1987). The two source works continue to reverberate in Korea today. “Nalgae” and its creator are icons both in and increasingly outside of Korea and the story is a pivot between Korean tradition and Korean modernity, taking as its central image the wings that symbolically inform one of the best-known Korean folktales—“Namukkun kwa sŏnnyŏ.” Kim Sŭngok’s stories for their part are inextricably connected with the 1960s; they are atmospheric portraits of the malaise of a society struggling to find itself after the 1950–53 civil war, the April 1960 student revolution, and the May 1961 military coup. In all four works—the source texts and their retellings—the theme of confinement is trenchant.

Fictional narratives flourished during the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), and a large number of recent short stories or novels in South Korea directly allude to or play upon themes in Chosŏn works. Bakhtin calls parodies “hybrid narratives”; this paper looks at both the intertextual hybridization of an “original” text with a “new” one. In Korea, the term parody is used broadly to refer to any text that reworks a previous text, and the parodies examined in this paper, Sŏ Hajin’s “Hong Kiltong” and Yi Munyŏl’s “Hong Kiltong ŭl ch’ajasŏ,” vary in their levels of parodicity. Sŏ’s and Yi’s borrowing from the Tale of Hong Kiltong, the piece of fiction attributed to Hŏ Kyun (1569–1618), serves a function different from the original text and yet pays tribute to it. Taking into consideration M. M. Bakhtin’s view that every parody forms a mutual illumination between a text and an earlier source, the article examines how Sŏ’s and Yi’s texts each associate and situate itself to the Tale of Hong Kiltong and covers a theoretical framework of parodic studies. The article also looks at the character Hong Kiltong and the ways he is reworked in parodic fiction.

The common written language of East Asia, classical Chinese (hanmun), did not hinder the Korean ethnic language. With the impact of hanmun, it developed into a written language that had the capacity to express high culture. The civil service examination system that tested candidates’ ability in hanmun writing was a literary examination because literature was valued over practical types of knowledge in governing society. The first poetic genre using Korean ethnic language, hyangga, internalized the world by embodying the ideology of an age that placed importance only on the mind, but in an age when both the outer material world and the inner mind were considered important, it was necessary to create didactic poetry, kasa, which globalized the self and lyric poetry sijo that internalized the world. The most important social change of the transitional period from the medieval era to the modern era was the emergence of the bourgeoisie, which demanded a change from a status-based society to a class-based society. The new literature initiated by the bourgeoisie, namely, the novel (sosŏl), was a rebellious child; disguising itself as biography, it destroyed earlier authoritative ways of thinking. Following the same process, East Asian countries created different products. The novels of China were writers’ novels, while the novels of Japan were publishers’ novels, and the novels of Korea were readers’ novels. Modern literature was born through overcoming two unfavorable conditions. As Western literature was introduced second-hand by the Japanese, the tradition of literature that may be considered a desirable model for the Third World. Indirect methods such as allusion, symbolism, and satire were all used with good effect as a way of coping with Japanese military rule that denied freedom of the press or of thought, as well as criticizing colonial rule and expressing the desire for national liberation.

The concept of civil religion refers to beliefs, symbols, and rituals as well as institutions which reinforce social cohesion, legitimate the socio-political system, and mobilize citizens to achieve common national objectives. Because it celebrates and reinforces the nation’s culture and history, civil religion is a source of powerful identity which promotes national unity and sustains individual commitment toward national goals. The question is thus: Is there civil religion in South Korea? If so, what are its characteristics? In view of these questions, this paper examines Korea’s culture, history, national symbols, and renewed traditionalism to identify the characteristics of Korean civil religion. The paper argues that a strong civil religion exists in Korea and that it has been an integral part of the nation-building process since the founding of the First Republic in 1948. The paper also asserts that a succession of authoritarian governments (1961–1993) has promoted strong civil religion to legitimatize the regime and to mobilize the masses to actively participate in the modernization and industrialization processes. Also examined in the paper is how Korean civil religion to this day has endorsed economic growth as the national goal to overcome all social ills; how Korean civil religion has promoted national confidence and pride regarding the country’s alleged ethnic and cultural homogeneity; how it has ascribed sacred meanings to such secular symbols as the flag and the national anthem; and how it has exalted Shamanism as a repository of Korean culture and has glorified certain traditional Confucian values.