The Confucian Transformation of Korea

The Confucian Transformation of Korea
Title The Confucian Transformation of Korea PDF eBook
Author Martina Deuchler
Publisher BRILL
Total Pages 456
Release 2020-10-26
Genre History
ISBN 168417015X

Download The Confucian Transformation of Korea Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Legislation to change Korean society along Confucian lines began at the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392 and had apparently achieved its purpose by the mid seventeenth century. Until this important new study, however, the nature of Koryŏ society, the stresses induced by the new legislation, and society’s resistance to the Neo-Confucian changes imposed by the Chosŏn elite have remained largely unexplored. To explain which aspects of life in Koryŏ came under attack and why, Martina Deuchler draws on social anthropology to examine ancestor worship, mourning, inheritance, marriage, the position of women, and the formation of descent groups. To examine how Neo-Confucian ideology could become an effective instrument for altering basic aspects of Koryŏ life, she traces shifts in political and social power as well as the cumulative effect of changes over time. What emerges is a subtle analysis of Chosŏn Korean social and ideological history.

The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History

The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History
Title The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History PDF eBook
Author Tʻae-jin Yi
Publisher Cornell East Asia Series
Total Pages 426
Release 2007
Genre History
ISBN

Download The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This volume makes available for the first time in English a collection of the work of historian Yi Tae-Jin. Over the course of his career, he has done path-breaking research that covers virtually the entire Chosōn period (1392-1910) from the Koryō-Chosōn transition to the Kojong period and Korea's takeover by Japan in 1910. One of the focal points of his scholarship has been to reinterpret Neo-Confucianism as a dynamic force in Korean history. The first half of this volume is devoted to his seminal work on the historical factors behind the founding of the Chosōn dynasty. He has shown how the rise of Neo-Confucianism during the Koryō-Chosōn transition was tied to unprecedented advances in agriculture and medicine that led to a fundamental socio-economic transformation of Korea. A new social class emerged that became a leading force behind the new dynasty and adopted Neo-Confucianism as its ideology. One of the underlying concerns of his scholarship has been to overcome the legacy of Japanese colonial scholarship on Korean historiography. His work refutes the notion of Korea as a "Hermit Kingdom" that was stagnant for centuries before its opening to the West. The second half of the volume includes some of his work on modernization efforts in the late Chosōn period, as well as some of his more direct critiques of the continuing influence of Japanese historiography in Korea.

Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk

Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk
Title Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk PDF eBook
Author Dennis Wuerthner
Publisher University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages 403
Release 2020-04-30
Genre History
ISBN 0824883047

Download Tales of the Strange by a Korean Confucian Monk Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes
Title Under the Ancestors’ Eyes PDF eBook
Author Martina Deuchler
Publisher BRILL
Total Pages 631
Release 2020-05-11
Genre Political Science
ISBN 1684175534

Download Under the Ancestors’ Eyes Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) to the late nineteenth century. This argument, underpinned by a fresh interpretation of the late-fourteenth-century Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition, illuminates the role of Neo-Confucianism as an ideological and political device through which the elite regained and maintained dominance during the Chosŏn period. Neo-Confucianism as espoused in Korea did not level the social hierarchy but instead tended to sustain the status system. In the late Chosŏn, it also provided ritual models for the lineage-building with which local elites sustained their preeminence vis-à-vis an intrusive state. Though Neo-Confucianism has often been blamed for the rigidity of late Chosŏn society, it was actually the enduring native kinship ideology that preserved the strict social-status system. By utilizing historical and social anthropological methodology and analyzing a wealth of diverse materials, Deuchler highlights Korea’s distinctive elevation of the social over the political.

The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T'oegye and Yi Yulgok

The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T'oegye and Yi Yulgok
Title The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T'oegye and Yi Yulgok PDF eBook
Author Edward Y. J. Chung
Publisher SUNY Press
Total Pages 366
Release 1995-01-01
Genre History
ISBN 9780791422755

Download The Korean Neo-Confucianism of Yi T'oegye and Yi Yulgok Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This is a study of the most significant debate in Korean Neo-Confucianism between the two most eminent Neo-Confucian thinkers, summarizing their philosophies and providing refreshing insights into Confucian language and culture.

Women and Confucianism in Chosǒn Korea

Women and Confucianism in Chosǒn Korea
Title Women and Confucianism in Chosǒn Korea PDF eBook
Author Youngmin Kim
Publisher State University of New York Press
Total Pages 178
Release 2011-11-01
Genre History
ISBN 1438437773

Download Women and Confucianism in Chosǒn Korea Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This volume offers a fresh, multifaceted exploration of women and Confucianism in mid- to late-Chosoán Korea (mid-sixteenth to early twentieth century). Using primary sources and perspectives from social history, intellectual history, literature, and political thought, contributors challenge unitary views of Confucianism as a system of thought, of women as a group, and of the relationship between the two. Much earlier scholarship has focused on how women were oppressed under the strict patriarchal systems that emerged as Confucianism became the dominant social ideology during the Chosoán dynasty (1392–1910). Contributors to this volume bring to light the varied ways that diverse women actually lived during this era, from elite yangban women to women who were enslaved. Women are shown to have used various strategies to seek status, economic rights, and more comfortable spaces, with some women even emerging as Confucian intellectuals and exemplars.

Quo Vadis Korea?

Quo Vadis Korea?
Title Quo Vadis Korea? PDF eBook
Author Shirzad Azad
Publisher
Total Pages 203
Release 2017
Genre Confucianism
ISBN 9781680530315

Download Quo Vadis Korea? Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In the mid-20th century, Korea was dubbed the last custodian of Confucianism, but it is now very hard to even call the country a truly Confucian society. Following this argument, Quo Vadis Korea? explores critically how some five decades of breakneck industrialization and unbridled modernization could ineluctably change the nation so fundamentally that their repercussions now sharply negate many basic principles of Confucianism in one way to another. This study is a critical overview of the politico-economic as well as socio-cultural characteristics of modern Korea from a rather different perspective. It discusses why many key objectives of industrialization and economic development projects were not really delivered as they were initially promised to the nation. They all had, consequently, significant ramifications for the entire Korean society, the way it functions now, and its peculiar reactions to strangers both inside and outside the peninsula. Shaped largely by academic studies, constant observation, and personal experiences, this book is tantamount to a detailed survey of lengthy and protracted fieldwork in which the author explains with rare candid clarity an appreciable chasm between the Korea he knew before landing on the peninsula and the one he studied incessantly and practically as a detached investigator in the place. By engaging this book, many unbiased and unprejudiced readers would have to acknowledge that the modern Korea is not all about certain brands or economic statistics that we often hear, but there are also many other social and cultural developments which the modernity project has imposed, somewhat arbitrarily, upon the nation.