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Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier . By Theodore Hughes . New York : Columbia University Press , 2012. xi, 271 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--Korea
In concluding this riveting study, Theodore Hughes describes his book as a cultural history of South Korea (p. 205). That is an understatement, as much as the book's title is an understatement. Rather than a classical cultural history, this book is a study of the formation and development of the South Korean cultural field as meant by Pierre Bourdieu (p. 11, n.17). As a study of the formation of South Korea's cultural field, the book deals with far more than literature and film. Also, period-wise, the book is not limited to the Cold War era (to be understood here as the first three decades of the Republic of Korea, or ROK), but also offers fascinating chapters on both the colonial and the liberation (1945-48) periods. The scholarly modesty that becomes Hughes shines through in the depth and breadth of his research, but has unfortunately stood in the way of a more audacious and deserving title. His is a sophisticated, rich, and tantalizing study that should appeal not only to literature and film scholars, but to historians in general. Too dense for undergraduate students, this is the kind of scholarship that a graduate seminar can feast on: empirically grounded, theoretically sound, analytically daring, and above all succinct...