Exploring colonial anxiety in the poetry and prose of Yi Sang

Abstract

The rest of this essay will be focused on this newfound awareness of the writers and poets of Korea, particularly of Yi Sang’s, whose expression of modernist sentiments under the guise of part-fiction and part-autobiography will began his literary legacy with his prose and poetic works that became more modern that the oeuvre of anyone else in Korea ever since. Using material from Yi Sang, ultimately, this essay seeks to show how Yi Sang’s work decisively and liberally transgresses the relatively staunch decorum of poetry that readers are accustomed to, and is in fact more delightful and powerful as an afterthought – an influence that lingers to this day. The emphasis will be on how his works reflect the difficulties faced by the Koreans at that point of time, and how the “colonial anxiety” he introduced into the modern literary scene lit the path for future writers to come.