During the decades around 1900, Koreans experienced a world falling apart and the need to quickly build a new one. Intellectuals naturally took centre stage in this era of epistemic paradigm change. This book is devoted to the study of the life and ideas of some of these intellectuals, focussing on how they dealt with the challenges of their times. Where did their respective moral and intellectual stances lead them, and what were the social, economic, and political constraints that bounded their trajectories? Their life stories provide micro-historical insights into a period that has been...

Focusing on previously neglected cultural expressions of colonial-period Korean socialism such as Marxist philosophy, Marxist historiography, and travelogues by socialist writers, The Red Decades reveals Marxian socialism as a cultural phenomenon of colonial-age Korea. Providing an account of the social composition of the Communist milieu in 1920s and 1930s Korea and outlining the aims of the colonial-period Communist movement as formulated in programmic documents, this text offers a rich, nuanced description of the microcosm of Korean Communism—a setting of factional alignments,...