Translated Encounters: Victorian literature in Korean “Complete Selected Works of World Literature”

Abstract

In 1959, Eulyoo Publishing launched a 100-volume“Complete Selected Works of WorldLiterature”(세계문학전집).Hardy, Eliot,(Charlotte)Brontë, and Dickens made it into the first 25 of the 100 selected works alongside Dante,Flaubert, and Gogol. Since then, many leading Korean publishers have presented similar “Complete Selected Works” that included 30 to 100 translated foreign literature, advertising the scholarly expertise and superior literary taste demonstrated in their selections. Despite recent efforts to expand the collections beyond the classic canon of European “masterpieces,” publication of translated literature has always demanded justification in terms of which works(of all the literary works around the globe)should be(=are worth being) translated into Korean.This study suggests that the specific appeal Victorian literature has had to the Korean reading public during the latter half of the 20th century merits a historical review, and the aforementioned selected collections provide unique critical insights regarding the political history of translation, (post)colonial implications of liberal education, and the peculiarity of the Korean context of “first encounters” with Victorian literature. By comparing translator’s notes and publisher’s introductions from representative collections of the 1950s,1970s, and 2000s, this study aims to rethink the cultural implications of literary translation. Since many of the translators who participated in establishing the tradition of “Complete Selected Works of WorldLiterature” have been scholars of English literature, an expanded version of this project will involve examinations of Victorian scholarship published in Korean academia.