Korea and Koreans as featured in literary works by non-Korean(ist) writers

collected responses by the readers of the e-list, KoreanStudies.ws in early October 2011:

There is "Kim of Korea" by Faith Norris and Peter Lumm ( a pseudonym that Bernard Malamud used when collaborating with another writer) New York: Julian Messner, Inc. 1955. It is a story about a Korean boy and an American soldier set during the Korean War.

Faith Norris was the daughter of Joan Grigsby ( http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/GrigsbyPreface.htm ) who lived in Seoul 1929-1930, and the story (meant for younger readers) includes mentions of the house Dilkusha where they lived. She imagined the war had left in ruined (not so it still stands, more or less). Faith Norris and Malamud taught together for a time at Oregon State College and Faith says that they sympathised as fellow Jews (she believed that her great-grandfather had been a Jew, a fantasy of her mother's invention).

Otherwise there is always the "Missionary Fiction" of the early 1900s by Lois Hawks Swineheart : "Jane in the Orient", "Sarange: A Child of Chosen" and "Korea Calls!" available to download at http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/BooksKorea.htm

Oddjob, the villain with the lethal bowler hat in Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, was Korean, though in the film, as I recall, he was portrayed as a generic inscrutable oriental.

The male protagonist of Han Suyin's A Many Splendored Thing, dispatched (fatally, as it turns out ) to report on the Korean War, makes the curious observation that "Korean women are not beautiful."

Incidentally, I seem to remember David Lodge confused Kyongju and Kongju (as then spelt) in Small World.

Chaim Potok's novel set in Korea and featuring Korean protagonists is I am the Clay, which was translated into Korean as ??? ? (hanjum-ui heuk--a
handful of earth). I found it stark and haunting. Potok was an army chaplain in Korea around the time of the war. A character who appears at the end of
the book is based loosely on him.

Potok?s book [is] as good a character study of Koreans as any written by Koreans. By the way, Potok was a rabbi, not the more likely
Christian or Catholic chaplains whose faiths had established missionary infrastructures in Korea and the USA Army. His cultural sensitivity is based
upon a very different understanding and affinity for social constructs of family / community, the value of education, etc.

Margaret Drabble's ambitious The Red Queen:
http://koreaweb.ws/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws/2005-July/004938.html

Eunice Park, in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad Love Story.

...Someone is venturing into Inspector O territory. Adam Johnson's next novel, The Orphan Master's Son, is set in North Korea. An extract is available here
(part of which I fear qualifies as an entry for the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex award)
http://electricliterature.com/blog/2010/09/03/excerpt-%E2%80%9Cfor-the-love-of-juche%E2%80%9D-by-adam-johnson/

Pearl Buck's novel set in Korea was The Living Reed, published in 1963 or 64 and again in 2004.

Isabella L. Bird?s diary like account of her travels, Korea and Her Neighbors, contains many portraits, although the work is non-fiction.

Popular culture also includes the books and scripts that led up to several American films and TV programs about the MASH units. I would venture to say that more Americans have been exposed to something they think (if at all) about Korea from the still in reruns TV series which presented various Korean ?types? in complex stituations.

In 1953 Humphrey Bogart starred as a MASH surgeon, along with June Allison as an Army nurse, in the film Battle Circus set in a Korean War MASH. In 1968 the novel Mash: A Novel About Three Army Doctors by

Richard Hooker brought the drama of the MASH units fully into public view, and became the basis of Robert Altman's 1970 film , followed by the 1972-1983 smash hit TV series. MASH became a permanent fixture of American culture. (source: http://olive-drab.com/od_medical_treatment_mash.php).

This for sure is not literature -- but I thought I mention it anyway, given how important Chinoiserie and Japonism were for upper class arts and art collectors in Europe and North America, but that there was never anything like Koreanism -- this is as close as you get: "Die Braut von Korea" (The Bride from Korea) a ballet from 1897
Music: Joseph Bayer (1852-1913), choreography: Josef Hassreiter

http://www.book1950.co.kr/main.html?menu=view&uid=283 (click small image to magnify)http://www.bildindex.de/obj07053790.html costume sketch by Franz Gaul (click small image to magnify)

The ballet was performed 38 times between 1897 and 1901 at the Wiener Hofoper (Vienna Court Opera)--that was the time when Gustav Mahler was the director there.

Perhaps this one is too well known to mention, but Jack London, who visited Korea when he was covering the Russo-Japanese War as a correspondent forHearst Newspapers, included a chapter set in Korea (Chapter 15, very loosely based around Hendrik Hamel's experiences) in his work *The Jacket *(*The StarRover* in the US), which was published in 1915 by Mills & Boon. See http://www.archive.org/details/jacketthestarrov00londuoft