Dust and Other Stories (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

Yi, T'aejun

ISBN 10: 0231185812 / ISBN 13: 9780231185813

Verlag: Columbia University Press, 2018

Beschreibung

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE Standard-sized.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers M0231185812Z2

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Dust and Other Stories (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 0231185812
• ISBN-13: 9780231185813
• Einband: Paperback
• Zustand: Very Good

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as “one who went north,” Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile in the 1950s, and little is known of his fate.

Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This collection unites his earlier modernist masterpieces from the colonial era with his little-known work penned during North Korea’s founding years, offering a rare glimpse into the making—and crossing—of the border between south and north. During the turbulent final years of Japanese rule, Yi’s elegant yet subdued stories championed both his native tongue and the belief in the capacity of art. In the heavily politicized environment of the North, his later works maintain a faith in the art of storytelling and a concern for the disappearance of customs in the throes of modernization. Throughout both eras, Yi focused on ordinary people: old men struggling to understand a changing world, lovers meeting up among ancient ruins, a lively widow targeted by a literacy campaign, a bourgeois couple trying to sustain themselves during the war by breeding rabbits, and more. Magnificently translated by Janet Poole, Yi’s work bears witness to global turmoil with a melancholic sense of enduring beauty.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yi T’aejun was born in northern Korea in 1904 and settled in Seoul, where he became one of colonial Korea’s most prolific and influential writers. Yi crossed the 38th parallel to North Korea in 1946. His date of death is unknown.

Janet Poole is a translator and literary historian who teaches Korean literature at the University of Toronto. She is also the translator of Eastern Sentiments, a collection of Yi T’aejun’s essays (Columbia, 2009), and the author of When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (Columbia, 2014).