Before and After the “Age of Literary Coteries”: A Diachronic Analysis of the Writer Network in Korea, 1917-1927

Abstract

The 1920s was a period when Korean writers entered the literary scene in collective form. Conventional literary history has examined social and literary groups from a perspective of dongin, a small number of “like-minded” writers in artistic orientations who ran a journal for their exclusive publication venue. Close reading, traditionally employed to highlight the historical importance of dongin’s collective aspect, however, cannot fully demonstrate how such dongin began to rise and the role they played in establishing the literary sphere during the early stage of modern literature. Therefore, instead of accessing dongin through close reading, this study considers it as a form of social network, which had open links to different periodicals, and thus was always changing according to the writers’ publication activities. Based on the record of fiction submissions to newspapers and magazines from 1917 to 1927, this study aims to create a writer-periodical network. By diachronically tracing the three major groups of writers —Changjo, Pyeheo, and Baekjo—in the making, I reveal the position of women writers as a prehistory to the formation of male-centered dongin, in contrast to the existing account wherein women writers are treated as an accessory for their male counterparts. The almost simultaneous appearance of both male and female writers in the late 1910, I argue, should receive due attention as a question in literary sociology and that reveals the hidden foundations of the literary reproduction system during the formative years of modern Korean literature.