The Making of Korean Cultural·Aesthetic Discourse by Western Missionaries from the Late 19th Century to the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article intends to comprehend, reappraise, and criticize how Western missionaries had perceived and interpreted the origins, transformations, characteristics of Korean traditional literature, fine arts, and music by analyzing related articles and essays primarily published in The Korean Repository, The Korea Review, and Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society from the late 19th Century to the First Half of the 20th Century. The author comes up with plausible and/or tentative conclusions as followings: First, Western missionaries contributed to building a solid foundation of Korean aesthetic discourse by drawing a periodization according to artistic achievement, selecting literary·artistic cannons, and classifying·cataloging major works/writers, thus stimulating the launch of the so-called “Choseon Studies Movement” by Korean intellectuals during Japanese colonial era. Second, many concerned Western missionaries agreed that Koreans managed to maintain its own authentic/original aesthetic tradition, distinguished from China and Japan. Third, Korean artistic tradition derives not from a singular but from plural origins and its own peculiarities are an outcome of a hybrid and transnational (re)production among Western missionaries, Japanese bureaucrat-scholars, and native Korean intellectuals.