Kang Kyong-ae

From Wonso Pond

Kang Kyong-ae

The recent media surrounding U.S.-Korea diplomatic relations increases the novel's significance. The Country and the City will be of particular interest to anyone eager to learn more about Korea, where families remain divided by a demarcation line drawn over fifty years ago at the end of World War II. There are very few works of Korean fiction available in the United States. This is the first complete novel written by a woman before the Korean War to be translated and published in English. Kang's novel is a unique look at life in Korea before the war. Written in a social-realist style, it is an important artifact of East Asian literature that describes the brutal conditions peasants suffered, shedding light on the roots of modern Korea, North and South, in the process. Kang's novel, about Korea under Japanese rule, explores the anti-colonial impulse at the heart of the early communist movement in East Asia. Given that postcolonial studies have been largely rooted within the Western tradition, Kang’s novel offers important evidence of a revolutionary tradition within Japan-occupied East Asia. The subject matter will be incredibly relevant in Asian history and literature courses and will be of significance to scholars worldwide who focus on women’s writing and/or colonial and revolutionary history and fiction. Kang's novel reveals the particular impact that industrialization, colonialism, and socialism have had on women and makes the issues of gender oppression and patriarchy central to its plot.