본문 바로가기
  • Home

Library as a Venue for Writing a New Intellectual History: An Analysis of the French Orientalist Book Collection in the Keijo– Imperial University Library

Yun Kyoung KWON 1

1공주대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article is a follow-up study of my last paper on the transnational networks of Orientalism embedded in the collection of French books on the Far East (Extrême-Orient) brought together by the Keijo Imperial University Library from 1926 to 1945. Utilizing the subject classification system of Keijo University Library, Chapter 2 looks into the inner structure of the library’s Extrême-Orient collection by themes and singles out particularly significant books. Here, three subjects―religion, language, and pre-modern history―are prominent. As a common denominator of those three categories, “Missionary Orientalism” stands out in the collection. In Chapter 3, we examine the purchasing pattern of the books by analyzing the library’s purchase account books so that we can conjecture the course by which those books were brought into the library. Ultimately, this study intends to contribute to the collective efforts for restoring the global crossreference systems embedded in Orientalism and in the process excavate the “Orientalism by Orientals” or “Sub-Orientalism” constructed in those transnational circuits of colonial knowledge. At the same time, it is suggested that the Keijo University Library can be a venue for writing a new intellectual history as a hub around which various stories of cultural and intellectual interconnections intersect one another.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.