Division and War

After 1945 the peninsula was divided, and in 1950 a war began that is still unresolved. Writers in the South took both as subjects. This chapter looks at what the survey source says about post-war writing, at two named writers whose work the sources tie to the war and the division, and, briefly and factually, at what an open source says about literature in the North.

What the Survey Article Says

The Korean literature article is short on the post-war period, and it names no post-war writers in its division and post-war sections. What it does say:

• "The Korean War led to the development of literature centered on the wounds and chaos of war and tragedy."
• Literature concerned with the national division (bundan soseol) "became more popular". No works or authors are named.
• Post-war South Korean literature much of the time addresses ordinary people's daily lives and their struggles with national pain.
• A traditionalist movement sought a return to traditional rhythms and folk sentiment, and an experimentalist movement among some poets aimed to bring new experiences to Korean poetry.
• "In the 1960s many South Korean writers started to reject post-war literature as sentimental escapism."
• In the 1970s, anti-establishment literature addressed rapid industrialisation, including neglect of farmers. Chapter 8 returns to this.

The article's division sections carry no citation tags, but the article as a whole is tagged "needs more citations" (March 2024). It names a few writers elsewhere: Ri Ki-yong (1895 to 1984), author of Kohyang (1932), "later a North Korean author", and the poet Cho Ki-chon, who "eventually moved to North Korea" with no year.

Two Writers and the War

Hwang Sun-won (1915 to 2000)

The Hwang Sun-won article calls him a South Korean writer of short stories, novels and poems, born under Japanese rule in what is now North Korea, who debuted as a middle-school student in 1931, studied English at Waseda University and later taught at Kyunghee University. It says his fiction followed ordinary Koreans through colonialism, ideological conflict, the Korean War, industrialisation and military rule, and that he sought to show the resilience of the Korean spirit rather than only adversity; children often appear as symbols of purity. It notes, especially early in his career, his refusal to write in Japanese, a stance it links to Yeom Sang-seop, and says that stance is described as a feature of his early years.

The article lists awards (the Asia Freedom Literature Prize in 1955, the Academy of Arts Award in 1961, the Samil Prize in 1966, the Korean Literature Award in 1983 and the Inchon Award in 1987) and English translations, among them The Stars and Other Korean Short Stories (1980), Trees on the Cliff (1980), Trees on a Slope (2005) and The Moving Fortress (2016). Its claims about his significance are attributed to the Korea Literature Translation Institute and to a reference work, Who's Who in Korean Literature. The article also notes that short fiction was the leading literary genre in Korea for much of the twentieth century.

Choe Inhun and The Square (1960)

The page I could reach is about the author, not the novel. It describes The Square (1960) in one sentence as following a Korean prisoner of war whose life is troubled and who dies by suicide amid an intensified ideological rift in the post-war era. It says the novel "immediately became successful", that it was published right after the April 1960 Student Revolution, and that this was "the starting point for a new era in Korea's modern literature". It lists an English translation by Kevin O'Rourke (Spindlewood, September 1985). It does not name the protagonist, the setting or the choices he makes, and says nothing on revisions across editions. I give no further plot.

A Short Factual Note: Literature in the North

This course follows South Korea after 1945, so this is a short note from one open source, the Wikipedia article North Korean literature, with its caveats. The article says output is shaped and controlled by the state: only members of the Korean Writers' Alliance may publish, works go through several levels of censorship and must praise the Workers' Party, and writers self-censor. It says the literature is "almost always characterized as socialist realism" (the critic B. R. Myers argues the mode has "failed" there, a minority view in Western scholarship), that after the mid-1950s Kim Il Sung denounced "foreign" elements, and that after a 1967 purge people were made to burn or donate foreign books. It names Han Sorya's Jackals (1951) and Hong Seok-jung's Hwangjini, which won South Korea's 2004 Manhae Literary Prize, the first time a North Korean writer received it. It is tagged as containing statements that may be dated (from 2020), much of its material comes from individual sources such as a defector, and some of its references are weak. That is all I say about the North in this course.

Exercises

Next chapter: Industrialisation, Dissent and Memory.