The Real Modern

“The Real Modern will have a profound impact not only on the ways in which we understand global modernisms, but on our understanding of colonial cultural production in general and 1930s colonial Korea in particular. Meticulously researched and developing a series of highly nuanced, original analyses of three major 1930s modernist Korean writers, The Real Modern [is] a most welcome addition to existing studies on Korean, Asian, and Western modernisms. Hanscom’s sophisticated approach to theories of language in 1930s colonial Korea offers, for the first time in English-language scholarship, a much-needed situating of the richness and complexity of colonial Korean modernism within the broader crisis of representation confronted not just by the modernists but, in varying degrees, by all colonial Korean writers and intellectuals in this period. [This is] a path-breaking [book that] completely revises our thinking about modern Korean literary history and the relations among politics, aesthetics, and modernism in colonial Korea.”—Theodore Hughes, Columbia University