The Counterespionage Novel and the Fostering of Wartime Subjectivity in Imperial JP and KR
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-11-05T01:21:23Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-11-05T01:21:23Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025-11-12 | |
| dc.description | Literature produced throughout Japan’s empire during the Second World War is recognized as having played an important role in the creation and maintenance of a wartime subjectivity, and nowhere was this truer than with detective fiction, arguably the war’s most popular genre. This presentation examines a sub-genre of detective fiction that was particularly active during the years 1941-5, the counterespionage novel (Jp. bōchō shōsetsu, Kr. pangch’op sosŏl). Focusing on Edogawa Ranpo’s Idainaru yume (1943-4), and Kim Nae-sŏng’s Maegukno (1943-4) two works that immerse readers in the subjective experience of the war through depictions of domestic espionage, I highlight the genre’s attempts to reconcile the enlightenment thinking of modern detective fiction with the sanguinary ethnic nationalism permeating the conflict. The result is a contradiction between a dependence on a rational modernity and the pressure to accommodate wartime ideology, in whose name modernity was being reoriented to serve a very irrational war. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10125/112599 | |
| dc.title | The Counterespionage Novel and the Fostering of Wartime Subjectivity in Imperial JP and KR |