Reviews
[Book provided for review] I came across this book while trying to take an interest in Joseon's greatest writer and broaden my reading into history. Being able to look closely, in one volume, at a person's life alongside the writing they produced is a rare experience. I think I only memorized “The Tale of Yangban” and “The Tiger's Scolding” for exams, but apparently he wrote twelve stories, including two that were lost. The book is divided into parts two and three, introducing one work at a
Reading Yeonam's Fiction began earning my trust with the word “read” in its title. I knew Park Ji-won's stories, but had never thought about what they meant. It was a pleasure to explore the familiar writer from my school days together with the author. There are many Chinese characters, so it wasn't always easy, but the detailed explanations make this a book I'd recommend. It interprets Yeonam's work as literature that directly confronted the problems of its time, not merely as humor or satire.
Kang Ho-yun: Yeonam's novels are poisonous
Reading Yeonam's Fiction traces Yeonam's life as a professional writer and student of Confucianism, along with twelve of his stories. Yeonam was Joseon's greatest prose stylist. His strategic writing and talent were extraordinary, yet as a Confucian scholar aware of his limitations, he knew how to humble himself. Even as he spoke with razor-sharp metaphors in a world full of absurdity, he kept his own life orderly. He loved his homeland, Joseon, and used fiction to depict, in detail, the lives of ordinary people. His life and work were inseparable. Reading for a Righteous Life takes “Don't Raise a Dog” as its starting point and reads each of Yeonam's twelve stories. “Reading” here means examining the stories using the author's field of expertise, critical terminology for classical fiction, in a genuinely exploratory way. Since most readers are unfamiliar with criticism of classical fiction, explanations of terms are provided throughout. Yeonam's stories, from “The Stableman's Tale,” written around age eighteen, to “The Tale of Lady Park of Hamyang, a Virtuous Woman, with a Postscript,” written in his fifties, form a single continuous narrative, like a Möbius strip, with no separate beginning or end. Their subjects differ, but they share an inner unity: exposing the absurdities of the yangban elite, focusing on the desperate lives of ordinary people, and showing how to live rightly. The stories reveal an unjust world of ordinary people and high-ranking yangban, good and evil, people who overturn the social hierarchy, justice and hypocrisy, and vulgar customs.
Korean title: 연암소설을 독하다
Korean author: 간호윤
Korean publisher: 소명출판
ISBN-13: 9791159058639
Reviews
[Book provided for review] I came across this book while trying to take an interest in Joseon's greatest writer and broaden my reading into history. Being able to look closely, in one volume, at a person's life alongside the writing they produced is a rare experience. I think I only memorized “The Tale of Yangban” and “The Tiger's Scolding” for exams, but apparently he wrote twelve stories, including two that were lost. The book is divided into parts two and three, introducing one work at a
Reading Yeonam's Fiction began earning my trust with the word “read” in its title. I knew Park Ji-won's stories, but had never thought about what they meant. It was a pleasure to explore the familiar writer from my school days together with the author. There are many Chinese characters, so it wasn't always easy, but the detailed explanations make this a book I'd recommend. It interprets Yeonam's work as literature that directly confronted the problems of its time, not merely as humor or satire.
