Formation of Korean-ness and Three Kingdoms

This project will be an original case study examining the reception of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in Korean over an extended period of time. In order to support my overarching purpose to understand the importance of Three Kingdoms in the formation of Korean cultural identity, I will undertake two case studies. The first investigates the changes made to Three Kingdoms as it was copied, and occasionally edited, by female copyists in the Chos?n period. The second looks at the transformation of the historical narrative of Three Kingdoms as it is continually reinvented in contemporary interactive media. Different as these two studies may appear to be, both are connected to an aspiration to understand (1) how a body of textual and/or cultural material changes over time, and (2) how these changes, when they take place across cultures, may be interpreted as appropriations that assimilate material from one culture into another. In other words, by studying the transmission of manuscripts in Chos?n Korea and the much more recent history of the video game, I endeavor to trace the process by which Three Kingdoms has become an integral part of the common cultural heritage of the Korean people, as Koreans continue to explore and express their “Korean-ness” through interactions (reading, editing, viewing, playing) with this body of material of Chinese origin. Chinese-Korean comparative literature and culture studies currently lack an Englishlanguage monograph exploring the influence of literary exchanges in the formation of Korean cultural identity. Such a monograph will thus be a key outcome of this three-year project. I plan to produce three peer- reviewed international journal articles and then work toward a full-length monograph upon project completion.