• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.41-66
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• 2019

This paper looks at the readers and publishing strategies of paperback romance novels in the the 1980s based on the 'high-teen' concept. The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning the 'high-teen' concepts as expressed in the media through the publication of paperback romance series in the 1980s. Among paperback romance series, this paper was based on pirated/licensed version of novels published by Harlequin, a Canadian publisher, and the magazine media's advertising promotional phrases that were published targeting the same readers. Since the 1970s, mass media have referred to teenagers as high-teens and called them important consumers. High-teen was a term referring to teenagers in school uniforms, mostly girls, and in the 1980s, 'high-teen' was also introduced as a new consumer market, and the publishing market put forward a number of publishing strategies to attract them. The paperback romance, including , has identified 'high-teen' readers as late-teen girls, sensitive consumers for best-sellers/million-sellers, readers with a tendency to read stories of love, and readers that favor American and Western culture. Since the 1980s, the market for paperback romance has been in the recession, but readers have kept the romance genre alive by accepting and localizing the Harlequin series. With the rise of a new form of media called the 'Web Novel', interest in the romance genre is increasing, and we hope this study will serve as a starting point for a variety of discussions with (women) readers about romance reading/enjoyment.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.67-99
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• 2019

This paper analyzed romance novels imported into Korea in the 1980s and examined the traits of Korean girls' culture at that time. To this end, This paper chose as subjects the series of 'high-teen romance' published by Samjungdang, 'princess bestseller' by Seoul Publishing and the 'silhouette romance' by Joongang Ilbo in the 1980s. Through the aspects of the paperback romances, the traits of the artist, the content of the work, and the response of the reader, this paper analyzed the position and affection of romance as a genre in Korean culture in the 1980s. In the 1980s, most of the paperback romances available in Korea were translations of the modern and progressive present lines of Harlequin Enterprise's category romance. There were also many writers who were mostly introduced with progressive characters like Charlotte Lamb. The Harlequin romance depicts a story of sensual love. These translated 1980s paperback romance novels allowed girls in Korea to freely imagine the problems of sex and love. In particular, it showed a new perspective on women's sexuality. In Korean love novels, the sexuality of women was treated as an object for the gaze of men. The novels of female writers as college student who criticized this dealt with women's sexuality, but focused on criticism and resistance to the ideology of chastity. The paperback romance made it possible for women to freely enjoy their sexuality by escaping the ethical standards of reality. In addition, the paperback romance was an escape from the frustration of love. Romantic love in Korean love novels did not lead to the unification of mind and body, and always ended in tragedy. On the contrary, the paperback romance started with the fear of the girl who felt love for the first time, showed the process of winning over anxiety, confirming love and reaching a happy marriage. Through this, girls understood general love that was not subordinated to the ideology of chastity, and accepted love positively. The process of establishing romance as a genre in Korean culture and the traits of its readers have not yet been sufficiently clarified yet. This paper compared the romance genre with the other love novels of the day, explaining the position and meaning of the romance genre in Korean culture in the 1980s. Through this, we were able to chart the historical development of the Korean romance genre.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.47
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• pp.1-26
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• 2017

This paper focuses on three novels that reflect absence of family. Conflicts caused by absence of parents or lack of function and role of parents were principle drivers fueling growth novels. In Chinese growth novels, children in a long-standing tradition of emulsion and political pressure were unable to express their conflict with parents. Out of the collective interest and only until the late 1980s, which can be found of the individuals were able to fully appreciate the growth of children. Since the late 1990s, the creative individual cases to the growth is an important point of Chinese growth. Due to a close relationship of the literature and politics further noteworthy that the growth of state for personal growth for China's growth. Reform and opening up the end of the Cultural Revolution, the emergence of new generation of cultural sensitivity with a relatively free personal attention to the growth of the chance that can be. In this paper, created since the 1990s, the growth of the stories of yuhua (余華)'s "Cry in the Rain"("在細雨中呼喊"), sutong(蘇童)'s "The Northern Part of the City"("城北地帶"), wanggang(王剛)'s "English"("英格力士"), going to go through by focusing on how to respond in the lack of family. "Cry in the Rain" shows that a consciousness orphan child abandoned main actors 'consciousness from his birth parents and adoptive parents. "The Northern Part of the City" chronicles different growth stories of children who experienced a void because of their absent families and found comfort in peer groups. "English" is distinguished from the mainstream narrative of Chinese growth in terms of creating a role model. Individual growth through the role model in that it will eventually establish their own identities and further growth. Because of that, this novel is considered best practices of Chinese growth novels. This kind of narrative, which returns to the memory of the growth of growth, has a richer connotation amid various attempts by writers out of the past era of obsession and fatigue.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.223-261
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• 2019

This article is a reexamination of the feminist criminal narrative I wish for what is forbidden by Yang Gui-ja in the context of the rise of the women's movement and consumer culture of the middle class in Gangnam in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, the explosive media culture served to strengthen the ideology that placed the middle-class family at the center as well as the consumption culture. The combination of consumer media culture, women's movement and democratization created a soft and domestic male image while visualizing the material foundation of the middle class in the 1990s of South Korea. In this novel, the domestic male image transforms the feminist criminal narrative into the narrative of the femme fatale attacking the stability and dignity of the middle class family, and at the moment of the transformation, the feminist woman Kang Min-ju is killed by a lower class man who has admired and loved her. This novel is not only current but also signifying as a text that overlaps sociocultural reproduction and feminist issues of the middle class based on Gangnam in the 1990s. This is because it shows the sociocultural context of femicide, such as serial murder of targeting women, as a core code of criminal narrative to be held in Korea since the late 1990s.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.321-359
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• 2019

In the 1970s, the full-scale development of the area now known as Gangnam began, ushering in the era of real estate investment on apartments which transformed housing styles in Korea. Apartments were pitched as the most ideal type of housing, creating a competitive market of high demand and skyrocketing prices. The apartments were also viewed as a means of quick asset investment among middle-class Koreans. Within this apartment frenzy stood the female real estate speculator, the bokbuin. This study seeks to locate the bokbuin in the real estate development market after the late 1970s. The apartment speculation boom cannot be attributed to the bokbuin alone, yet she became the target of public anger and criticism, singled-out as being responsible for fueling illegal and unethical investments. The apartment boom of the 1970s was in fact generated in large part by the government, developers, construction companies and realtors. While their pursuit of profit was deemed as legitimate, the bokbuin's conduct was mostly tainted by presumed illegitimate and greedy motivations. This study problematizes this gendering of real estate investment and treat the bokbuin as a byproduct of the family-centered culture in East Asia. Analyzing Im Kwon Taek's film "Mrs. Speculator", Park Ki Won's conte, "Bokbuin", Park Wan Seo's short story, "Children of Paradise", "The People of Seoul", this study shows that bokbuin's pursuit was not hers alone; it was the collective pursuit with her husband for the enhancement of family finances. This stud y argue that the bokbuin embodied the thickly misogynistic climate of the 1970s that projected the chaotic rise of greed onto the woman.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.37
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• pp.361-392
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• 2014

Regarding works that express objects realistically in painting, Gustave Courbet advocated realism in the mid-19th century, France, resisting the then academist style of painting, and works in realist style were produced in earnest by painters such as H. Daumier or Jean F. Millet, who went along with him. Later, realism has expanded into the realm of general literature, including fine art, which has had profound impacts on works of art and literary works. In comics, too, in the same historical context as a form of painting, realistic comics began to be produced by painters or cartoonists at the time. These realism comics are those dealing with stories based on facts, and in terms of contents, objective description and representation of the social realities of the times is one of the most important objectives, but it could not be concluded that in their visual aspect, that is, that of expressing the objects, they were realistic. In the meantime, a graphic novel was born, which was the intermediate form between comics and novels around the United States and Europe since the 1980s. Graphic novels appeared in forms and styles with strong literary and artistic values in the comics market in the U.S. which was full of the superhero genre (comics around heroes), and their major characteristics are very realistic expressions in terms of contents and visual aspect. They are complex and delicate and even have artistic, literary values as if readers read a fiction or literary work of which its narrative structures or pictures are produced with graphics. The characteristics of realistic expressions shown in graphic novels are very different from the previous works of comics. It is noteworthy that they began to be acknowledged as works of art like painting or illustration, thanks to their features of strongly individual auteurist painting style, a fairly high degree of completion of the works, and creative and experimental expression techniques or methods, instead of following the fashion of the times. In recent years, in South Korea, Hollywood blockbuster films have been released one after another and become box office hits, there are increasing interest and demand for the original graphic novels. Accordingly, many original graphic novels have been translated and started to be sold, and keeping pace with this global flow of fashion, some writers in Korea began to produce works of graphic novels. However, to look into the domestic works produced claiming to be graphic novels, there are various opinions on their format and authenticity. In this sense, this study focused on Ga-ya Kwon's Namhansanseong, one the representative works of Korean style graphic novels, and in particular, it attempted to analyze their characteristics and commonalities focusing on the visual aspect of realistic expressions of objects. It is expected that there would be an opportunity to seek for ways so that Korean style graphic novel can be further developed as a genre of comics, with competitiveness by looking back on the identity and present state of domestic graphic novels and developing and applying Korea's original subject matters differentiated from those of graphic novels in the U.S., Europe or Japan through this study. In addition, it is desired that they will be a new energizer for the stagnant domestic comics market.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.243-277
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• 2020

This paper examines a social and cultural history of horror films through the keyword "technology", focusing on The Spark of Fear: Technology, Society and the Horror Film (2015) written by Brian N. Duchaney. Science fiction film is closely connected with technology in film genres. On the other hand, horror films have been explained in terms of nature/supernatural. In this regard, The Spark of Fear, which accounts for horror film history as (re)actions to the development of technology, is remarkable. Early horror films which were produced under the influence of gothic novels reflected the fear of technology that had been caused by industrial capitalism. For example, in the film Frankenstein (1931), an angry crowd of people lynch the "monster", the creature of technology. This is the action which is aroused by the fear of technology. Furthermore, this mob behavior is suggestive of an uprising of people who have been alienated by industrial capitalism during the Great Depression. In science fiction horror films, which appeared in the post-war boom, the "other" that manifests as aliens is the entity that destroys the value of prosperity during post-war America. While this prosperity is closely related to the life of the middle class in accordance with the suburbanization, the people live conformist lives under the mantle of technologies such as the TV, refrigerator, etc. In the age of the Vietnam War, horror films demonize children, the counter-culture generation against a backdrop of the house that is the place of isolation and confinement. In this place, horror arises from the absolute absence of technology. While media such as videos, internet, and smartphones have reinforced interconnectedness with the outside world since the 1980s, it became another outside influence that we cannot control. "Found-footage" and "torture porn" which were rife in post-9/11 horror films show that the technologies of voyeurism/surveillance and exposure/exhibitionism are near to saturation. In this way, The Spark of Fear provides an opportune insight into the present day in which the expectation and fear of the progress of technology are increasingly becoming inseparable from our daily lives.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.143-177
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• 2021

In the history of Korean literature, evaluations on 『Jirisan』 (Lee Byeong-ju) are bisected. Some evaluate it as a novel of authentic records which reproduces the history before and after the emancipation objectively while others say it takes advantage of anti-communistic ideology. This study analyzes that difference is resulted not from the distinction of perspectives but from cracks in the text. This is associated with the process of 『Jirisan』's publication. 『Jirisan』 was published serially in 『Sedae』 from 1972, and then, part of the manuscript was published in 1978 and the whole edition published in a series came to be republished in 1981. After that, in 1981 and 1985, part of the follow-up story was printed on the magazine, and then, with the memoirs of those two years as materials, the sixth and seventh volumes were again published through 'revision'. In other words, the publication of 『Jirisan』 is divided into that of the edition published in a series and that of the edition published in 1985 including the contents of revision. The theme of the work, 『Jirisan』 differs according to the point of its completion you may think of. This researcher pays attention to the difference of perspectives between the contents up to the fifth volume and those of the sixth and seventh volumes. Particularly, his evaluation on 'partisans' seems to have changed. In the edition published in a series, he extended 'partisans' into the independence movement in the Japanese colonial era under the Revitalizing Reforms system and adopted the representation of 'partisans' three-dimensionally whereas in the sixth and seventh volumes, he reproduced 'partisans' as beings that were the 'doctrinaire' and 'vicious' 'Reds' and had to be punished. In brief, with 『Jirisan』, he represented 'partisans' in the background of history before and after the emancipation and segmented the discourse, representation and ideology of the Cold War system, but in the process of revision, he stitched up 'partisans' as beings that were evil and losers. Consequently, with 『Jirisan』, he revealed the process of division and contention that proceeded around anti-communism/capitalism within the abyss of the 1970's to 80's and reproduced 'partisans' as beings that were either 'hostile (the Reds)' or 'unknown (losers)