Echoing Song

Description

"This first comprehensive anthology of modern Korean women's poetry in English demonstrates the originality and variety of the twenty poets whose work is presented. Each poet is represented with a group of poems that reflects her poetic development, and most have written a brief statement expressing her reasons for writing poetry." "The anthology follows the changes that occurred in women's poetry through the years. Women poets have been publishing in Korea since the 1920s, but the principal emotion that pervaded their poetic world was, according to Kim Chongnan, a sentimentalism that emphasized female passivity. It wasn't until the 1970s that an independent female identity began to assert itself when the hangul generation, the first generation not educated under colonial Japanese rule, began to be published. These women developed a citizen's consciousness that spurred the growth of self-identity. By the 1980s, female poets had broken free of past taboos and began to write freely about their bodies and sexual desire. As we begin the 21st century, a new generation of poets has arisen. While male poets agonize over the surface world's aridity, Korean women poets have begun to push open the door to the subconscious and follow the pathway blazed by Rimbaud. As the most powerless genre in Korean society, women's poetry has the least exchange value and is less corrupted by commercialism, allowing it to remain removed from the grand symbolic framework of postmodern society, and allowing the poets to enter the deepest recesses of the soul."--BOOK JACKET.

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