11 Classic Korean Narratives including Myths, Folktales, Sino-Korean Novels and Poetry Readers can come to know not only the pleasure of reading stories, but also delight in learning about Korea through this book, like Korean culture, Korean history and Koreans' ways of thinking in the old days. Even though this book consists of only Korean classic narratives, this doesn't mean that only Koreans can understand it. Everyone can understand and enjoy a “Classic.” What Brings "Classics" Alive is the Readers' Empathy A lonely boy becomes a hero who establishes a nation; a daughter who is abandoned becomes a goddess who manages death; a wife and husband, both ordinary people, become a queen and king in a foreign country or gods of a country. These stories show that if people take advantage of their merits and use their power in support of others, they can accomplish wonderful things and gain happiness even when they possess nothing special. The reason that these stories survive for such a long time without being forgotten and move the people who read them is that people consider the thoughts and feelings in these stories to be precious. A Way of Communicating with Time: The World of Classical Imagination Reading the classics is similar to the experience of communicating across time. The world of classics, which appears interesting and mysterious, also contains the dreams and hopes of contemporary people. Even though the past has disappeared, we are encountering the dreams and hopes of people from olden times as you read the classics and fall into the world of these stories.

This book is a collection of myths and legends describing the beliefs and customs of the ancient people in the formative stage of Korean civilization, and will help the reader understand the Korean people, their traditions and their culture. The twenty-eight myths and legends in this volume are selected from several books of historic importance. Though they have been enjoyed throughout the ages in Korea, they are not known outside so well and this volume will fill that void.

A comprehensive collection of the finest Korean tales and legends passed down through generations. The 55 captivating tales in this collection reflect the breadth of Korean tradition and ancestral wisdom. Order your copy now!

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation.”—Entertainment Weekly One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “Ferocious.”—The New York Times Book Review (Ten Best Books of the Year) “Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff “Provocative [and] shocking.”—The Washington Post Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Celebrated by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her. A Best Book of the Year: BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly

Grimms’ fairy tales are among the best-known stories in the world, but the way they have been introduced into and interpreted by cultures across the globe has varied enormously. In Grimms’ Tales around the Globe, editors Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey bring together scholars from Asia, Europe, and North and Latin America to investigate the international reception of the Grimms’ tales. The essays in this volume offer insights into the social and literary role of the tales in a number of countries and languages, finding aspects that are internationally constant as well as locally particular. In the first section, Cultural Resistance and Assimilation, contributors consider the global history of the reception of the Grimms’ tales in a range of cultures. In these eight chapters, scholars explore how cunning translators and daring publishers around the world reshaped and rewrote the tales, incorporating them into existing fairy-tale traditions, inspiring new writings, and often introducing new uncertainties of meaning into the already ambiguous stories. Contributors in the second part, Reframings, Paratexts, and Multimedia Translations, shed light on how the Grimms’ tales were affected by intermedial adaptation when traveling abroad. These six chapters focus on illustrations, manga, and film and television adaptations. In all, contributors take a wide view of the tales’ history in a range of locales—including Poland, China, Croatia, India, Japan, and France. Grimms’ Tales around the Globe shows that the tales, with their paradox between the universal and the local and their long and world-spanning translation history, form a unique and exciting corpus for the study of reception. Fairy-tale and folklore scholars as well as readers interested in literary history and translation will appreciate this enlightening volume.

This book contains 175 tales drawn equally from the ancient and modern periods of Korea, plus 16 further tales provided for comparative purposes. Nothing else on this scale or depth is available in any western language. Three broad classes of material are included: foundation myths of ancient states and clans, ancient folktales and legends, modern folktales. Each narrative contains information on its source and provenance, and on its folklore type, similarities to folklore types from China, Japan and elsewhere.

A fascinating survey of the entire history of tall tales, folklore, and mythology in the United States from earliest times to the present, including stories and myths from the modern era that have become an essential part of contemporary popular culture. Folklore has been a part of American culture for as long as humans have inhabited North America, and increasingly formed an intrinsic part of American culture as diverse peoples from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania arrived. In modern times, folklore and tall tales experienced a rejuvenation with the emergence of urban legends and the growing popularity of science fiction and conspiracy theories, with mass media such as comic books, television, and films contributing to the retelling of old myths. This multi-volume encyclopedia will teach readers the central myths and legends that have formed American culture since its earliest years of settlement. Its entries provide a fascinating glimpse into the collective American imagination over the past 400 years through the stories that have shaped it. Organized alphabetically, the coverage includes Native American creation myths, "tall tales" like George Washington chopping down his father's cherry tree and the adventures of "King of the Wild Frontier" Davy Crockett, through to today's "urban myths." Each entry explains the myth or legend and its importance and provides detailed information about the people and events involved. Each entry also includes a short bibliography that will direct students or interested general readers toward other sources for further investigation. Special attention is paid to African American folklore, Asian American folklore, and the folklore of other traditions that are often overlooked or marginalized in other studies of the topic.

Dragons, ghosts, ogres, tigers, demonic foxes, supernatural spouses and people with all their human frailties are among the characters that have traditionally populated Korean folk tales. The more than 60 stories in Korean Folk and Fairy Tales will entertain as much as educate, helping readers to better understand an important aspect of Korean culture that is intimately tied in with the character of the people.

Comprehensive yet portable, this account of the development of Chinese literature from the very beginning up to the present brings the riches of this august literary tradition into focus for the general reader. Organized chronologically with thematic chapters interspersed, the fifty-five original chapters by leading specialists cover all genres and periods of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, with a special focus on such subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion upon literature, the role of women, and relationships with non-Sinitic languages and peoples.

One of the most important and celebrated works of premodern Korean prose fiction, Kŭmo sinhwa (New Tales of the Golden Turtle) is a collection of five tales of the strange artfully written in literary Chinese by Kim Sisŭp (1435–1493). Kim was a major intellectual and poet of the early Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897), and this book is widely recognized as marking the beginning of classical fiction in Korea. The present volume features an extensive study of Kim and the Kŭmo sinhwa, followed by a copiously annotated, complete English translation of the tales from the oldest extant edition. The translation captures the vivaciousness of the original, while the annotations reveal the work’s complexity, unraveling the deep and diverse intertextual connections between the Kŭmo sinhwa and preceding works of Chinese and Korean literature and philosophy. The Kŭmo sinhwa can thus be read and appreciated as a hybrid work that is both distinctly Korean and Sino-centric East Asian. A translator’s introduction discusses this hybridity in detail, as well as the unusual life and tumultuous times of Kim Sisŭp; the Kŭmo sinhwa’s creation and its translation and transformation in early modern Japan and twentieth-century (especially North) Korea and beyond; and its characteristics as a work of dissent. Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk will be welcomed by Korean and East Asian studies scholars and students, yet the body of the work—stories of strange affairs, fantastic realms, seductive ghosts, and majestic but eerie beings from the netherworld—will be enjoyed by academics and non-specialist readers alike.