Romancing Precolonial Korea: The Making of Chosŏn Yadam as Heritage Tales in Early Twentieth-Century Korean Publishing

Abstract

Early twentieth-century Korean publishing was undergirded by a twofold urgency: the construction of a new inscriptional culture premised on the telos of text production using the Korean writing system and the imperatives of the production of knowledge about Korea’s past against colonial censorship and the colonial episteme. This paper traces early twentieth-century reception of yadam texts from Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). The paper first examines how the ‘Syosyŏl’ (쇼셜 小說) section of the Korean-language weekly Kyŏnghyang sinmun (Capital and Provinces Weekly, 1906.10.19–1910.12.30) integrated eighteen Chosŏn yadam texts in 1909 and next analyzes the rhetorical framing and orthographic materiality of several collections of tales from precolonial Korea in the 1910s and 1920s. These two reception moments formed a process of transcontextualization that authenticated tales of precolonial Korea as heritage tales, priming Korean co-nationals to romance Korea’s precolonial past as an idyllic haven and a wellspring of national pride.