Romanticism in Colonial Korea: Coterie Literary Journals and the Emergence of Modern Poetry in the Early 1920s

Abstract

This essay shows how British Romanticism contributed to the inception of modern Korean poetry, focusing on the burgeoning coterie literary journals that helped the young poets of the 1920s to form their own identities as modern artists of a colonized nation. Romanticism’s aesthetics of transcendence helped to shape Korean articulations of hope and despair as the defining political emotions of the 1920s, and influenced the spirit of the decade after the March First Declaration of Independence (1919). The essay concludes by discussing ways in which British and European Romanticisms served as channels through which the poets of the 1920s addressed their own aesthetic identities and political anxieties in complex colonial conditions.