A comprehensive and critical introduction to understanding the Korean Wave (Hallyu) as a transnational media phenomenon. This book provides an accessible introduction to the Korean Wave—the rapid growth of local cultural industries and the global popularity of Korean popular culture over the past 30 years—providing historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural context to its initial rise and enduring popularity. Jin explores the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu across a variety of products and digital technologies—from television dramas, film, and K-pop to online games, and webtoons—and explains the process of cross-media convergence and the socio-political contexts behind the Hallyu phenomenon. He also explores how overseas fans and audiences advance K-pop fandom as social agents in different geo-cultural contexts. The book concludes by discussing if Hallyu can become a sustainable global popular culture beyond a fan-based regional cultural phenomenon. Each chapter features detailed contemporary case studies and discussion questions to enhance student engagement. This is essential reading for students of Media and Communication, Cultural Studies, Korean Studies, and Asian Studies, particularly those taking classes on popular culture and media, media and globalization, Korean popular culture, and East Asian culture.

This book sheds light on aspects of the Korean Wave and Korean media products that are less discussed—Korean literature, webtoon, and mukbang. It explores the making of these Korean popular cultural products and how they work and engage media recipients regardless of their different national, cultural, and geographical backgrounds. Drawing on narrative theory and cultural studies, the book makes a compelling argument about how to analyze the production and consumption of Korean media within and beyond its national boundary with critical eyes. The author shows how transmedial narrative studies (narrative studies across media) offers analytical and theoretical lenses through which one can interpret new and emerging media forms and contents. Furthermore, she explores how these forms and contents can be better understood when they are contextualized within specific time and place using the cultural, social, and political concepts and precepts of the region. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Asian Studies, popular culture, contemporary cyberculture, media and culture studies, and literary theory.

Since the Korean Wave phenomenon started in 1997, Hallyu has undergone many changes. Geographically, while Asia has been the largest cultural market for the Korean cultural industries, other parts of society, including North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America have gradually admitted Korean popular culture. The components of the Korean Wave have also greatly expanded. Hallyu originally implied the exports of a few cultural products, such as television dramas, popular music, and films; however, Korea has recently developed and exported K-pop, digital games and smartphone technologies as well as relevant youth culture. Meanwhile, industrial and technological contexts of the Korean Wave have changed significantly during the last 20 years. The role of social media in the Korean Wave’s transnationalization in recent years is especially intriguing because fans around the world can easily access social media to enjoy K-pop, digital games, and films. The changes in the nature and appearance of the Korean Wave, conceptual and theoretical shifts in the studies of the Korean Wave, and the influences of the development of media technologies on the Korean Wave are all very significant. This book aims to provide a better understanding of Hallyu's theoretical and institutional history on one hand, and new features of the Korean Wave on the other hand.

Samosir and Wee examine how the immensely popular Korean Wave ("K-wave") also known as Hallyu is wielded as soft power through the use of communication for persuasion and attraction on the global stage. The Korean Wave refers to the global spread and popularity of South Korean culture, particularly its pop music ("K-pop"), serialised dramas ("K-dramas") and films ("K-films"). Given the South Korean government’s involvement in providing funding and publicity, the Korean Wave raises interesting sociolinguistic questions about the relationship between artistry and citizenship, the use of social media in facilitating the consumption of cultural products, and, ultimately, the nature of soft power itself. Studies of soft power have tended to come from the field of international relations. This book shows that sociolinguistics actually has a number of tools in its conceptual arsenal – such as indexicality, stance taking, affect, and styling – that can shed light on the Korean Wave as a form of soft power. As the first book-length sociolinguistic analysis of the Korean Wave and soft power, this book demonstrates how K-pop, K-dramas, and K-films have been able to encourage in consumers an anthropological stance towards all things Korean. This volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, political science, cultural studies, and Korean studies.

Film viewing presents a unique situation in which the film viewer is unwittingly placed in the role of a multimodal translator, finding themselves entirely responsible for interpreting multifaceted meanings at the mercy of their own semiotic repertoire. Yet, researchers have made little attempt, as they have for literary texts, to explain the gap in translation when it comes to multimodality. It is no wonder then that, in an era of informed consumerism, film viewers have been trying to develop their own toolboxes for the tasks that they are faced with when viewing foreign language films by sharing information online. This is particularly the case with South Korean film, which has drawn the interest of foreign viewers who want to understand these untranslatable meanings and even go as far as learning the Korean language to do so. Understanding Korean Film: A Cross-Cultural Perspective breaks this long-awaited ground by explaining the meaning potential of a selection of common Korean verbal and non-verbal expressions in a range of contexts in South Korean film that are often untranslatable for English-speaking Western viewers. Through the selection of expressions provided in the text, readers become familiar with a system that can be extended more generally to understanding expressions in South Korean films. Formal analyses are presented in the form of in-depth discursive deconstructions of verbal and non-verbal expressions within the context of South Korea’s Confucian traditions. Our case studies thus illustrate, in a more systematic way, how various meaning potentials can be inferred in particular narrative contexts.

This study examines the development and characteristics of various historical and contemporary genres of Korean literature. It presents explanations on the development of Korean literacy and offers a history of literary criticism, traditional and modern, giving the discussion an historical context.

The current phenomenon of Hallyu wave lashing the world shores with its cornucopia of cultural products is truly a cultural “dynamite” that has impacted a massive revisioning of all the accepted ideas of popular culture that existed prior to its entrance on the stage of world imagination. Its influence ranging from novel culinary habits to new ways of looking at gender has garnered the attention of researchers to closely look into the various nuances of the new popular culture.

Webtoons—a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form—are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe, especially among youth. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world. The rise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural market due to the growth of transmedia storytelling—the flow of a story from the original text to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digital games—and the convergence of cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this content anytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons or as webtoon-based big-screen culture. Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows, and it illuminates snack-culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people’s shifting media consumption.

The Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource that explores the formation and transformation of Korean culture and society. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview on key topics, including: compressed modernity, religion, educational migration, social class and inequality, popular culture, digitalisation, diasporic cultures and cosmopolitanism. These topics are thoroughly explored by an international team of Korea experts, who provide historical context, examine key issues and debates, and highlight emerging questions in order to set the research agenda for the near future. Providing an interdisciplinary overview of Korean culture and society, this Handbook is an essential read for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well scholars in Korean Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Asian Studies in general.