Invincible And Righteous Outlaw

One of the most important and popular premodern Korean novels, The Story of Hong Gildong is a fast-paced adventure story about the illegitimate son of a nobleman who becomes the leader of a band of honest outlaws who take from the rich and punish the corrupt. Despite the importance of the work to Korean culture—it is often described as the story of the Korean Robin Hood—studies of the novel have been hindered by a number of myths, namely that it was authored in the early sixteenth century by statesman Heo Gyun, who wrote it not only in protest of Joseon-dynasty laws on the rights of illegitimate children, but also as a manifesto of his own radical political ideas. In Invincible and Righteous Outlaw, the first book-length study of the novel in English, Minsoo Kang reveals that The Story of Hong Gildong was most likely written by an anonymous mid-nineteenth-century writer whose primary concern was appealing to the increasing number of readers in the late Joseon looking to be entertained and that the myth of Heo’s authorship can be traced to the writing of literary scholar Kim Taejun in the 1930s. Following a detailed examination of the history and literary significance of the novel—including analysis based on Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the universal figure of the noble robber—Kang surveys the many afterlives of the hero Hong Gildong, who throughout the decades has appeared and reappeared in countless revisionist novels, films, television dramas, and comics, even inspiring the creation of a Hong Gildong theme park in South Korea. He shows how the story was altered, distorted, and reinvigorated during and after the Japanese colonial period in both the North and the South for political, social, and literary purposes. While demonstrating the continued relevance of the novel and its hero in Korean culture up to the present day, Kang makes it clear that such narratives have served mostly to distance readers from a better understanding of this classic work.

A December Stephen Curry Book Club Pick One of ESPN’s 25 Can’t Miss Books of 2019 “A feel-good story.”—New York Times Book Review “This isn’t simply a sports book. Rather, it’s a book about inspiring and courageous women who just happened to be hockey players.”—Korea Times The inspiring, unlikely story of the American, Canadian, South Korean and even North Korean women who joined together to form Korea’s first Olympic ice hockey team. Two weeks before the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics, South Korea’s women’s hockey team was forced into a predicament that no president, ambassador or general had been able to resolve in the sixty-five years since the end of the Korean War. Against all odds, the group of young women were able to bring North and South Korea closer than ever before. The team was built for this moment. They had been brought together from across the globe and from a wide variety of backgrounds—concert pianist, actress, high school student, convenience store worker—to make history. Now the special kinship they had developed would guide them through the biggest challenge of their careers. Suddenly thrust into an international spotlight, they showed the powerful meaning of what a unified Korea could resemble. In A Team of Their Own, Seth Berkman goes behind the scenes to tell the story of these young women as they became a team amid immense political pressure and personal turmoil, and ultimately gained worldwide acceptance on a journey that encapsulates the truest meanings of sport and family.

A beautiful lady who can only be seen from far away, a machine that generates an entire civilization, a king who loves the hidden life of an inanimate statue, a city that appears once a year across a great chasm, an ancient Korean king assassinated in the dark of the night, a ghost that haunts soldiers on the DMZ - these are just some of the marvels you will encounter in these stories from the transcultural and metafictional imagination of Minsoo Kang. In diverse narratives grouped under the titles of Tales from a Lost History, Fables of the Dream World, and Stories from an Imaginary Homeland, Kang explores the nature and possibilities of storytelling itself as he spins out variations on an episodic theme, reinterprets an old myth, and struggles with a past that seeks a voice in the present. The result is a marvelously surrealistic landscape where histories, ideas, and legends freely intermingle and dance to the music of wonder and longing.

Søgeord: Japanske Fangelejre; Britisk Koloni; POW Camps;

Hong Gildong, a brilliant but illegitimate son of a noble government minister, cannot advance in society and embarks on a series of adventures, joining a band of outlaws, vanquishing assassins and monsters, and founding his own kingdom.

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Providing a comprehensive interdisciplinary assessment, and with a particular focus on expressions of tension and anxiety about modernity, this collection examines visual culture in nineteenth-century Europe as it attempted to redefine itself in the face of social change and new technologies. Contributing scholars from the fields of history, art, literature and the history of science investigate the role of visual representation and the dominance of the image by looking at changing ideas expressed in representations of science, technology, politics, and culture in advertising, art, periodicals, and novels. They investigate how, during the period, new emphasis was placed on the visual with emerging forms of mass communication?photography, lithography, newspapers, advertising, and cinema?while older forms as varied as poetry, the novel, painting, interior decoration, and architecture became transformed. The volume includes investigations into new innovations and scientific development such as the steam engine, transportation and engineering, the microscope, "spirit photography," and the orrery, as well as how this new technology is reproduced in illustrated periodicals. The essays also look at more traditional forms of creative expression to show that the same concerns and anxieties about science, technology and the changing perceptions of the natural world can be seen in the art of Armand Guillaumin, Auguste Rodin, Gustave Caillebotte, and Camille Pissarro, in colonial nineteenth-century novels, in design manuals, in museums, and in the decorations of domestic interior spaces. Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830-1914 offers a thorough exploration of both the nature of modernity, and the nature of the visual.

Derived from the renowned multi-volume International Encyclopaedia of Laws, this book provides ready access to how the legal dimension of prevention against harm and loss allocation is treated in Hong Kong. This traditional branch of law not only tackles questions which concern every lawyer, whatever his legal expertise, but also concerns each person’s most fundamental rights on a worldwide scale. Following a general introduction that probes the distinction between tort and crime and the relationship between tort and contract, the monograph describes how the concepts of fault and unlawfulness, and of duty of care and negligence, are dealt with in both the legislature and the courts. The book then proceeds to cover specific cases of liability, such as professional liability, liability of public bodies, abuse of rights, injury to reputation and privacy, vicarious liability, liability of parents and teachers, liability for handicapped persons, product liability, environmental liability, and liability connected with road and traffic accidents. Principles of causation, grounds of justification, limitations on recovery, assessment of damages and compensation, and the role of private insurance and social security are all closely considered. Its succinct yet scholarly nature, as well as the practical quality of the information it provides, make this book a valuable resource for lawyers Hong Kong. Academics and researchers will also welcome this very useful guide, and will appreciate its value not only as a contribution to comparative law but also as a stimulus to harmonization of the rules on tort.