Reading Colonial Korea through Fiction: The Ventriloquists introduces to the English-speaking world the work of Kim Chul, one of the leading scholars of modern Korean literature, who has helped to reshape the field of Korean studies on both sides of the Pacific. The thirteen essays anthologized together in the volume give the reader a glimpse into Kim Chul’s pioneering scholarship that effectively puts modern ‘Korea’ under erasure through his unrelenting exploration of ‘Korea’s’ multiplicity, paradoxicality, ambivalence, and contradictions that stem from the imbrications of colonization, modernization, nation-building, and empires. This study, which combines Kim’s expansive insights about colonial modernity with his razor-sharp close readings of amazing colonial literary works, is eminently teachable and will make an indispensable companion to numerous related college courses.
