Hyungji Park

Hyungji ParkHeinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996), a novel-memoir of the author's childhood growing up in a U.S. military base camp in South Korea, serves at once as a searing indictment of and an oddly nostalgic account of the particular and peculiar spaces created by American military bases around the globe. This essay situates the cultural and gender interactions that arise from such hybrid kijich'on communities within the concept of the Great Game of late nineteenth-century/

The historical event of the Indian Rebellion and the publication event of Coventry Patmores The Angel in the House both functioned, in their separate ways, as formulations of an iconic Victorian womanhood of the 1850s. Both borrowed from existing views of English womanhood as the essential core of national identity, and framed her as an ideal, reified, and pure abstraction. In this essay I bring together two apparently unrelated ideasan imperial military conflict that decided the fate of the Bri

The Immigrant as Spy Hyungji Park (bio) Native Speaker (1995) graces the syllabus of every Asian American Literature course I teach, undergraduate or graduate. The book has everything—a protagonist with affective disorder; sex, politics, and arson; parental grief; an elusive white woman; intergenerational rift; espionage and betrayal; and a large photo of the author himself on the back cover of the paperback edition. My choice for this American Book Review assignment was simple: for an English l

As Edward Said pints out, Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations poses a critical nexus between the criminal and the colonial, through Magwitch's use of cash earned in Australia the penal colony in order to fund the making of Pip into an English gentleman. this paper proposes that the plot structure of Great Expectations employs a widely accepted Victorian "separation of spheres" between criminality and Empire on the one hand, and English society on the other, only to reject that separation

For late nineteenth-century Victorians full of curiosity about their world, travelers writing home with narratives of the exotic served as one source of an imagined East. Among such traveler-writers were two extraordinary women, Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) and Isabella Bird Bishop (1831-1904), who spent much of their lives in foreign lands and published influential books that contributed to the representations of Asia that catered to the curiosities of the non-traveling Victorian public. Steel

The Victorian detective plot often depicts Empire as a frequent source of criminal agents, criminal means, or criminal incentive. In many cases, such a narrative places the Englishwoman in a position of potential victimization by colonial forces, and the colonial detective plot at times becomes a version of the romance narrative: the (often male) detective figure becomes the hero that protects the Englishwoman in what is at once a chivalric and a nationalistic project. At the same time, the dete

Vampires have come a long way. From literary and filmic depictions as black-caped, coffin-dwelling creatures of the night, in recent years vampires have come to live among us. Rather than being seen as threatening predators, contemporary vampires have found ways to live among humans, and are now students, have jobs, have families, and contribute to society. And yet their difference from mortals and their special capabilities give this “new vampire,” often stronger and immortal, the option to do

Younghill Kang’s autobiographical novel East Goes West (1937) depicts a set of intellectual, overly educated Korean expatriates displaced to 1920s America. Equipped with a vast amount of cultural capital－of knowledge of Western and Eastern literatures in particular－the central character Chungpa Han and his compatriots find that the “West” is not only a place of literary pursuits but of sharp economic marginalization. For Han and his fellow Korean exiles, their cultural capital is incompatible wi

This essay reflects on the experience of undoing NAVSA in Seoul for EVENT 2024. Through four vignettes, we, the Seoul Hub organising committee, analyse the unique position of the Seoul Hub, engaging with Victorian studies from an Asian perspective. The first vignette contrasts the experience of Korean scholars at NAVSA 2022 in Bethlehem with the Seoul Hub, highlighting the shift from being perceived as ‘native informants’ to engaging in genuine lateral dialogue. The second vignette explores how

In Park Chan-Wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden, the most dramatic turn of events comes as the main characters swap identities at the moment of incarceration in an insane asylum. The source text for Park’s film, Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith, is indebted to Victorian literature in its depiction of women’s madness as a socially constructed category that prevents certain women from full civic participation. Fingersmith portrays a world in which women are confined to insane asylums in entirely

Frankenstein, birthed within an extraordinary sequence of pregnancy, childbirth, and child loss for its author Mary Shelley, has long been placed alongside Shelley’s biography to discuss how issues of reproduction and parental responsibility inflect the “creation” of human life. Procreation in Frankenstein is complex: whether the creation of humans involves electricity, magnetism, or any number of electric human emotions such as lust, “the cause of generation and life” remains mysterious and ine

Janice Y. K. Lee’s 2009 New York Times bestselling novel The Piano Teacher is set alternately between the 1940s and 1950s and describes the years of the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong during World War II and its aftermath a decade later. The novel includes scenes of the Hong Kong internment camps in which Western (Allied) subjects were incarcerated under Japanese control. Against this backdrop, the novel’s core romance traces the relationship between Trudy Liang, a half-Chinese, half-Portugues