UCLA

This dissertation examines how colonial Korean literature imagined transregional affiliations through China during the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than approaching China as a unified national entity or simply as the counterpart of colonial Korea, it argues that Korean writers mobilized Shanghai and Northeast China as literary spaces through which they rethought the nation, empire, and the regional future of East Asia. By shifting attention from nation-based comparison to transregional encounters, the dissertation demonstrates how colonial Korean literature challenged the assumption of discrete, homogeneous national cultures and imagined alternative forms of political and social community.Opposing the scholarly assumption that colonial Korean literature emerged solely from the relationship with Japan—its colonizer and a significant mediator of Western modernity—this dissertation foregrounds how colonial Korean writers engaged with China as their literary background and as a site for exploring notions of nation, empire, and East Asia. Building on recent scholarship in transregional East Asian literary studies while departing from nation-centered literary historiography, the dissertation analyzes short stories by Chu Yosŏp, Kim Kwangju, Ryu Sŏ, and Sim Hun, situating their works within the historical contexts of exile, migration, anarchist and socialist movements, and multilingual cultural exchange across the Chinese mainland. Each chapter explores a different mode of transregional affiliation. Chapter One examines multilingual encounters and the limits of the national language in Chu Yosŏp's fiction. Chapter Two analyzes Korean migrant communities across Northeast China and Shanghai in Kim Kwangju’s writings to challenge the myth of a unified exile community. Chapter Three investigates Ryu Sŏ's anarchist vision of a Korean–Chinese community beyond ethnic divisions, while Chapter Four examines Sim Hun's socialist conception of East Asia through revolutionary networks extending from Shanghai across the region. Together, these chapters demonstrate how colonial Korean literature reconfigured China as a literary space for imagining alternative political affiliations and regional futures beyond both Japanese imperial discourse and nation-centered conceptions of East Asia.