Figuring Korean Futures

Abstract

This book is the story of the emergence and development of writing for children in modern Korea. In the 1920s, a narrator-adult voice began to speak for the first time directly to a child-reader whose mind was deemed knowable and moldable. Writers and educators saw the qualities of this unique child audience manifest in a new concept called the child-heart, or tongsim. This book examines children’s literature at the moment the child emerged as a powerful metaphor of Korea’s future, through the colonization of Korea, and up until the ideological entrenchment that intensified in the post-liberation period. By reading children’s periodicals against the political, educational, and psychological discourses of their time, this book argues that the child-heart concept was particularly productive for the project of modernity and nation-building, as well as for the colonial and postcolonial projects of socialization and nationalization, because it posited the child in a symbiotic relationship with the natural world that allowed for explorations of the meaning of culture and nature at a time when culture and nature were deeply contested. This book reveals a trajectory of Korean children’s prose and poetry that begins with depictions of the child as an organic part of nature and ends with the child as the agent of the control of nature. Ultimately, the book reveals the complex ways the figure of the child became a driving force of nostalgia that stood in for future aspirations for the individual, family, class, and nation.