Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. xxiii, 235 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7442-1.
The story of the heroic outlaw Hong Kiltong (Hong Gildong) is one of the most ubiquitous and representative narratives in contemporary Korean popular thought. The basic narrative of the tale describes the awkward relationship of the son of a concubine to his aristocratic his father and his inferior place in society. Hong Kiltong’s trials and the alleged resolution of his situation by creating a state of which he is the ruler creates a fast-paced story that results in a trenchant criticism of pre-modern Korean society. Minsoo Kang’s monograph on the subject is by far the most thorough and comprehensive piece of research on the subject in English, or Korean, and will be the benchmark by which all subsequent studies will be judged.
Kang’s work is divided into two broad sections of three chapters each. The first section considers the history of the story itself and how it was transmitted down to the present day, while the second section considers modern (twentieth and twenty-first century) representations and usages of the story. In addition to an extensive set of footnotes and bibliographical sources in English, Korean, and Japanese, the book contains a descriptive list of the 34 extant historic manuscripts containing the story. Usefully, the text contains words and phrases in both the Korean phonetic script and in Chinese characters.
The first section discussing the history of the story of Hong Kiltong is the most original and important contribution that Kang makes to scholarship about this classic tale. The author states that there are four assumptions which are commonly held by Koreans about the Hong Kiltong story: 1) that it is the first fictional story written in the han’gŭl phonetic script; 2) that it was composed by the 15th–16th-century Korean statesman Hŏ Kyun; 3) that Hŏ was a friend of sons of secondary wives of aristocratic men, and that he wrote this fictional tale to highlight their plight; and 4) that Hŏ “was an idealistic reformer who sought to create a more egalitarian society” (3). Through thorough historical and textual analysis, Kang proceeds to demolish all four of these assumptions. He demonstrates that there is no evidence for a literary work containing the narrative of the tale of Hong Kiltong before the second half of the nineteenth century, and that it was Kim Taejun’s seminal history of Chosŏn literature, Chosŏn sosŏlsa, that established the common assumptions about the origins of the tale and its author, still held by Koreans today. Importantly, Kim’s book was written in the context of the Japanese occupation of Korea and it was the need to have cultural sources that rejected negative aspects of the Chosŏn era (1392–1910) while affirming Korean cultural tradition which led to Kim’s conclusions. However, Kang does feel that the tale reflects the aspirations of an emerging wealthier middle class of the nineteenth century in the context of a state in political decline. By providing both a social critique and a fast-paced adventure tale, the story attained wide-spread popularity.
In the second section of the book, Kang discusses subsequent uses of the tale, which he calls the tale’s “many afterlives.” The author discusses the differing interpretations of the tale during the colonial period—from both imperialist and nationalist perspectives—including the appearance of two early Korean films based on the tale. He then considers the tale in the post-liberation period until 1986 in both North and South Korea. Social realist authors such as Pak T’aewŏn created an expanded narrative to the basic tale, while other authors created children’s stories and comic book stories based on the classic tale. Sin Sangok, a prominent South Korean film director, was captured by North Korean agents and made a film on Hong Kiltong which reflected the North Korean regime’s political philosophy chuch’e. From the 1990s, South Korean media and cultural arts have had a wide influence on the modern pop culture of the world, a phenomenon called the “Korean wave.” In this vein, films have been produced which rework the basic tale including an updated version featuring “descendants” of Hong Kiltong to illustrate socio-political action. Two places in South Korea even cultivate “Hong Kiltong tourism.” This section demonstrates how a literary work can have a continued influence on society not only for its ideas, but also on its economy. In this sense, the story of Hong Kiltong can be compared to the story of Robin Hood.
Regrettably, I must make a major criticism of this excellent work. The author decided not to use the system of transliterating Korean words and phrases into the Latin alphabet used by most scholars, known as the McCune-Reischauer system. This decision was regrettable because the M-R system is the best transcription system allowing non-Korean speakers to produce sounds comprehensible to Korean speakers, and because it was the standard in South Korea from 1948 until the year 2000. The Romanization system was the creation of the three most important Korean phoneticians of the mid-twentieth century: Ch’oe Hyŏnbae, Chŏng Insŏp, and Kim Sŏn’gi. They were working during the Japanese colonial period to produce a transcription system that would enable non-Koreans to pronounce accurately Korean words. Of the systems used traditionally for Romanizing East Asian languages, the so-called McCune-Reischauer system is the only one which was created by nationals of that country. The M-R system is their monument and should be recognized as such. I have advocated changing the name of the system to CCK to reflect the importance of the work of these phoneticians.
This regret aside, Kang Minsoo’s work is an important contribution to scholarship and is to be highly commended to scholars and students in the areas of folklore, contemporary culture, social history, and the broad areas of East Asian Studies and Korean Studies.
James H. Grayson
The University of Sheffield, Sheffield