Understanding Hallyu: The Korean Wave Through Literature, Webtoon, and Mukbang

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.

Hyesu Park received her PhD in English from Ohio State University in 2014 and is currently an associate professor of English at Bellevue College, Bellevue, WA. In 2015 and 2016, she was a visiting professor at FLAME University, Pune, India. Her research interests include American and Asian-American literatures, narrative theory, media studies, and South Korean literature and popular culture. Her articles have appeared in Image and Narrative, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, and American Book Review. Most recently, she edited Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences. Currently, she is working on a monograph, Narrating Other Minds: Alterity and Empathy in Post-1945 Asian American Literature (forthcoming).