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Girl readers and contemporaneity of popular literature in the colonial era : Focussing on reading trend of Japanese literary works and popular magazines
Journal of Popular Narrative
2014, 20(2),
pp.7-35
DOI :10.18856/jpn.2014.20.2.001
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
DOI :10.18856/jpn.2014.20.2.001
Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
Research Area : Interdisciplinary Research
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Reading of girl’s and girl readers are often estimated to be of an inferior and sentimental sorts rather than that of men’s and youth readers. And women writers’ works are also low-estimated by the rhetoric of ‘girlish’ and ‘girlish taste’. In Korea girls of modern times in the early 20thcentury gradually emerged from obscurity to the surface in the reader’s culture and market, as they were educated in the public schools and learned reading and writing in Korean and Japanese. Although they were very small group, only 1~2 percent of total population of Korean women, they played more and more important roles in reading book market at that time. Girl readers of colonial Korea slid in to the gap between high class reading culture (elite readers) and low quality reading culture (sentimental popular readers) and they developed their own reading tastes and reading trends. Especially they were enthusiastic for reading Japanese popular literary works so as to poems of Saijo Yaso, novels of Gikuchi Gan and Japanese pop magazines for women and girls such as <Friend of wives>, <Girl’s club>. Simultaneously the huge commercialized publishing industry from Japan in the 1930’s absorbed newly emerged girl readers rapidly also in Korea. It was certain that girls were important targets for the publishing industry, but they existed in between children and adults, men and women, elite culture and popular culture, therefore they had rather freely developed their tastes for books and reading and made cracks in the main stream elite culture and crashed border lines of popular low-class culture and elite high-class culture.
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