This article offers a revisionist perspective on the relationship between 1960s North and South Korean literature by showing how writers in the North engaged with and creatively rewrote works from the South. Contextualizing such practices within a longer history of cross-border reading in the North, the article highlights how North Korean poetry and drama from the immediate aftermath of South Korea's April Revolution of 1960 took up South Korean literature's image of the volcano and reimagined it as a symbol of North-South dialogue. The article then turns to Kim Myŏngsu's Mother of the South (1965), showing how the play rewrites the South Korean novelist An Tongnim's short story “Hope” (1963) in such a way as to engineer a convergence with a line of literary representations then being produced in the North about its own colonial-era “revolutionary heritage.” Finally, the article suggests that this convergence ended up reshaping such visions of North Korea's own revolutionary past and the figure of the militant mother that emerged within them.
This article argues that the North Korean mediascape of the 1950s and 1960s must be understood in relationship to its interaction with publications from the South. To do so, it makes three methodological interventions. First, it demonstrates how North Korean writers’ own practices of citation can be used to outline the extensive and expanding body of South Korean texts available in the North during this period. Second, it shows how a focus on such references and their changing character allows us to see a shift in the late 1950s and early 1960s: one that enabled a selection of South Korean texts to be reprinted in the North, producing intersecting reading publics. Finally, it demonstrates how an understanding of this changing relationship to South Korean texts illuminates changing writing practices in the North and the hybrid texts linking North and South Korean authorship that they produced. The article thus contends that the 1950s and 1960s mediascapes of the two Koreas must be seen as imbricated rather than isolated entities.
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