A Review of English Novel Studies in Korea

Abstract

This study reviews English novel studies in Korea for the past 60 years, to examine the ways in which English novel studies in Korea have developed and further contribute to the future of English scholarship in Korea. Since reflecting on all the English novel studies in Korea is immense, this study focuses on articles published in Studies in British and American Language and Literature from 1960 to 2019. Organizing the articles by decades, this review attempts to indicate the notable features of each decade and shows who was researched most actively. While Henry James was researched the most by far, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf were the most favorite novelists throughout the last 6 decades. Female novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf, were first introduced in the 1970s, which shed some light on the sharp increase in the study of female novelists for the coming years: Jane Austen topped the list in the 2000s and Toni Morrison in the 2010s. 2000s saw the most remarkable expansion in research: the number of the articles doubled and novelists from countries other than the British and American were first introduced. Korean scholarship on English novel studies has expanded not just in its number of articles, but also in its diversity.