Literature of North Korea

Abstract

As the division between North and South Korea hardened in the period following the country's liberation from Japan's colonial rule in 1945, North Korea set forth a number of objectives designed to ensure the establishment of a socialist polity in the North. The construction of socialist culture was one such objective – and literature, as an integral part of this culture, was to play a prominent role in the concerted effort to pursue class-based socialist ideology. The term “literature of North Korea” refers to literature based on such an objective since 1945. The development of North Korean literature, therefore, reflects changes that were taking place in North Korean society and politics. The period from the liberation to the early 1960s was marked by an emphasis on the duty of literature, as the artistic realization of socialist ideology, to serve party and people. For the North Korean government, the paramount goal that emerged through a sequence of experiences – the liberation, the Korean War, and the division of the Korean peninsula – was the establishment of a socialist order. For the accomplishment of this goal, literature became the central tool in rallying support for this aim and in the consolidation of socialist ideology in North Korean society. From the mid-1960s, however, North Korean literature came increasingly to focus on the chuch'e (self-reliance, autonomy) thought of Kim Ilsŏng as the ideological basis for literary production.