Abstract
This essay shows how British Romanticism contributed to the inception of modern Korean poetry, focusing on the burgeoning coterie literary journals that helped the young poets of the 1920s to form their own identities as modern artists of a colonized nation. Romanticism’s aesthetics of transcendence helped to shape Korean articulations of hope and despair as the defining political emotions of the 1920s, and influenced the spirit of the decade after the March First Declaration of Independence (1919). The essay concludes by discussing ways in which British and European Romanticisms served as channels through which the poets of the 1920s addressed their own aesthetic identities and political anxieties in complex colonial conditions.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Dr. Moon Jina for reading the draft of this essay and making numerous constructive suggestions, and to Ms. Kim Myungju and other librarians in the Center for Korean Classic Collection of the Library of Yonsei University for their generous help in locating journals, magazines, and rare books.
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Shin, KS. (2019). Romanticism in Colonial Korea: Coterie Literary Journals and the Emergence of Modern Poetry in the Early 1920s. In: Watson, A., Williams, L. (eds) British Romanticism in Asia. Asia-Pacific and Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3001-8_6
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