• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.64-76
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• 2020

This research wanted to examine what narratives and discourse were being formed in web drama contents young generations were going crazy about. To understand the characteristics of such love epics and to know what narratives were being formed based on narrative structures and comments, this research specifically used the web drama produced up to the season 4 for the first time in Korean web drama history with a large number of accumulated views. It was found that the narratives of the drama composed the romantic relationships of four couples as independent episodes, and realistically highlighted separations and reunions of those couples, and suggested concrete methods to solve agonies and conflicts they would experience in such relationships. And, in user comments, there emerged relational narratives confusing friendship and love between partners of opposite sex, narratives regarding the third person as enemy, and narratives on typical sex roles in such romantic relations. And, the culture seeking subjective love style and sharing and sympathizing with the love histories also appeared.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.640-650
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• 2016

This study analyzed the narratives of love of "delusional" characters in the works of Jungae Lee and Shijin Yoo, whose cartoon creations were prominent in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Their delusional characters can be characterized by excessive obsession with their objects of love, rejection of realistic logic, madness, and extreme selfishness. They make a type of characters whose traces have disappeared not only in the South Korean society of the 21st century, where love and dating are included in the discourse of self-development and dramatic pathos is regarded as the waste of feelings, but also in creative works. It is still, however, needed to pay attention to the selfishness and collapse of those delusional characters that reject the order of the world and focus only on their love because they make the audience betray the sentimentality of melodramas stimulated by the popular culture and reconsider the concept of "love" itself. While Jungae Lee displays the progress of delusional characters and their narratives of love toward collectivized compulsion with the Messiah motif of Christianity, Shijin Yoo presents a narrative of delusional characters with lost memories reacting to hysterical fantasies and eventually choosing their collapse. Their two narratives are significant in that they propose the archetype of personal desire eliminated by the narratives of love in melodramas.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.285-294
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• 2017

In this study, change of the view of love was analyzed by big data analysis in TV drama of married person's love. Two dramas were selected for analysis with opposite theme of love story. The sympathy of audience for the one month period from the end of the drama was analyzed by text mining and sentiment analysis. In particular, changes in the meaning of home meaning are identified. Home is not 'a place where a husband and wife play a social role', but 'a place where they can share real sympathy and one can be happy'. If individuals are not happy, they need to break their homes. In this study, the current divorce rate and the question regarding the matter should be considered. But based on Google Trends, in Korean society, interest in marriage were still higher than romance. It means that people prefer to 'a love to get marriage' in Korean modern society, than 'love for love affair'. It seems to be reflection of cognition change, marriage should be based on true love. This study is expected to be applied to the study of trend change through social media.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.247-275
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• 2019

We hope that more diverse interests will arise in the novels by Park Gye-hyeong By looking at writers and works in time, we identified the key element of Park Gye-hyeong's novels as 'romantic'. Romantic nature of this time is lyrical, sentimental, spiritual, unrealistic and idealistic. Based on a romantic understanding of the world, the core sanction of the novel is love, focusing on feelings of sadness, and on the aspects of joy, separation, and pain that arise from loving relationships rather than the aspects of joy. Based on the feelings of grief, the novels end with failure, death and betrayal, thus embodying tragic romanticism. Before her marriage, Park Gye-hyeong's novels were love stories that revealed her longing for beautiful love based on sensibility. The idyllic world and longing for nature reveal a romantic world-view. Ultimately, it is a fictional worldview that the author seeks to despair and long for, and to find the sincerity and morality of love in an environment that does not. Park Gye-hyeong, who became a housewife, expressed that she wanted to write a piece that can give readers a sense of nostalgia by embodying "romance at a high level," not "sentimental." In subsequent works, physical relationships are treated as failures of love and spiritual relationships as the fruit of love, revealing the lofty spirituality, idealistic longing and religious nature of love. Park Gye-hyeong confessed her shame about her previous work when she published a new one after more than two decades of writing. And after more than two decades of reflection, her new novel had a new theme of "recovering destroyed humanity." However, the search for "humanity" in the two novels released after the write-off tends to be somewhat hasty at the end of the novel. The question of human nature, sin and forgiveness, is the next best thing to save as a way of life, rather than as a result of the intense inner agony and behavior of the characters within the narrative, and this also shows a sudden shift in religiousness at the end of the novel. Therefore, the romantic meaning of the superficial is superficial.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.191-219
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• 2020

This paper aims to identify the key features of the novel writing of Korean American immigrants and their meaning as one aspect of movement and contact occuring in the early modern period. The late return of the novels written by Nakcheong THUN in the 1930s is significant in that it restored ideas on the diversity of early modern mobility and confronted the history and culture of immigrants who were excluded from records and memories. Not only are these novels a product of the phenomenon of immigration, but they have also created a crack in the dichotomous perceptions of domination and subordination, center and periphery by envisioning it as a space that creates new history, culture, institutions and values. These novels treat the free love of intellectual, emotional, and ethical figures as a central event, demystifying Western free love, and at the same time, a society divided by various identities including class, race, and gender. The novels by Nakchung THUN visualize the active exchange between the immigrant and the indigenous community through the character of Jack, and imagines the heterotopia as a place where not for the immigrants' utopia, but for everyone's coexists. These novels have declared a kind of memory war on the subordinate and marginalized contact zones. The contact zones of the immigration area had been a place for experiencing extreme conflicts and discords, and at the same time, it has served as a place where various groups and communities are connected. The contact zones were common areas of solidarity and creation before being subject to division and occupation. The contact zones are far from the border or borderlands, so it is not a fixed and immutable deadlock. As a world free from central domination the contact zones have been a space that preoccupied history and culture through various encounters, and have been a community.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.123-153
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• 2020

As the importance of documented fact has weakened in historical dramas, the combination with other genres has become prominent. By reviewing the way romance is dealt with in historical dramas, this research examines how the properties of historical events adopted by historical dramas are related to the motif of love, and how the narrative of love and romance contributes to the historical effects, with a focus on the television drama Mr. Sunshine. Mr. Sunshine is the first historical drama written by Kim Eun-sook, combining deliberately rearranged history with the writer's unique grammar of romance. The failed resistance movement of the righteous army in the drama is matched with the love that cannot be achieved based on self-negation. The drama, which deals with the tyranny of Japanese imperialism and the independence of Joseon, fictionalizes key characters and events, transforming the desire of love into the passion of patriotism. Romance in Mr. Sunshine serves as a catalyst for emphasizing the tragedy of historical events and reconstitutes cultural memories. In historical dramas, the fictional plot of romance leads viewers to reflect on human life in history that flows from the past to the future. How does an individual's inner feelings contribute to the historical representation? This research is significant as it is the first attempt to examine the relationship between historical drama and romance in various ways.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.679-693
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• 2016

The purposes of this study were to examine the patterns of recalling memories in the series and look into the desires of viewers disclosed in the process. Entering the 2010s, people got to recall their memories from the 1980s and 1990s. Nostalgia and retro became cultural products. What made the series, those depict the pure love, friendship, and family affection of main characters under age in those decades, so popular among the viewers? Finding a repeating pattern in recollection of the past, dating, and family love, the investigator saw that the pattern met the needs of viewers and thus analyzed their desires inherent in the series with a focus on its "narratives" and "characters." Their unique sounds effect and music established a micro-narrative that could be divided, thus allowing viewers to own certain scenes easily, which worked to make "non-existent" memories. Secondly, the series succeeded in capturing the desire of viewers living in the age of neoliberalism to reduce their fatigue from excessive choices by setting the characters in a contrived way and thus presenting the desire of maintaining the stable middle class world with no conflicts and the passive female characters. The recollections provided by the series, in the end, fill the desire and deficiency of the present beyond a simple return to the past.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.67-99
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• 2019

This paper analyzed romance novels imported into Korea in the 1980s and examined the traits of Korean girls' culture at that time. To this end, This paper chose as subjects the series of 'high-teen romance' published by Samjungdang, 'princess bestseller' by Seoul Publishing and the 'silhouette romance' by Joongang Ilbo in the 1980s. Through the aspects of the paperback romances, the traits of the artist, the content of the work, and the response of the reader, this paper analyzed the position and affection of romance as a genre in Korean culture in the 1980s. In the 1980s, most of the paperback romances available in Korea were translations of the modern and progressive present lines of Harlequin Enterprise's category romance. There were also many writers who were mostly introduced with progressive characters like Charlotte Lamb. The Harlequin romance depicts a story of sensual love. These translated 1980s paperback romance novels allowed girls in Korea to freely imagine the problems of sex and love. In particular, it showed a new perspective on women's sexuality. In Korean love novels, the sexuality of women was treated as an object for the gaze of men. The novels of female writers as college student who criticized this dealt with women's sexuality, but focused on criticism and resistance to the ideology of chastity. The paperback romance made it possible for women to freely enjoy their sexuality by escaping the ethical standards of reality. In addition, the paperback romance was an escape from the frustration of love. Romantic love in Korean love novels did not lead to the unification of mind and body, and always ended in tragedy. On the contrary, the paperback romance started with the fear of the girl who felt love for the first time, showed the process of winning over anxiety, confirming love and reaching a happy marriage. Through this, girls understood general love that was not subordinated to the ideology of chastity, and accepted love positively. The process of establishing romance as a genre in Korean culture and the traits of its readers have not yet been sufficiently clarified yet. This paper compared the romance genre with the other love novels of the day, explaining the position and meaning of the romance genre in Korean culture in the 1980s. Through this, we were able to chart the historical development of the Korean romance genre.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.368-377
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• 2020

In this paper, the transmission and the phases of the memories in the novels dealing with Vietnam War have been studied. As a research method, Aleida Assmann's memory theory which plays a role in culturoloy theory is utilized. This study shows firstly that the others' voices excluded from the official memories of Vietnam War have emerged. Vietnam War novels released after 1990s actively reflecting the others' voices transmitted fresh the cultural memories. As the stories of civilian massacre, defoliant victims, and children of mixed bloods, Lai Daihan excluded from the official memories have emerged as a main them in the Vietnam War novels, they have become resistant memories. Existence and Formality, a Vietnam War novel by Bang Hyeonsuk brings up how to remember Vietnam War. His another novel, Time to Eat Lobster shows that without the fundamental retrospect and introspection of Vietnam War, Korea can't help but have the identity of America. Secondly, this paper shows that the tragedy of Vietnam War remains as a trauma that human bodies remember. White War by Ahn Jeonghyo shows that the memory moves back to the past in the process of struggle. In the novel, Slow Bullet by Lee Daehwan the phases of demage from defoliants lead to the family's tragedy. The Red Ao Dai by O Hyeonmi shows how a Korean-Vietnamese overcomes negation of his father and win his identity. In A Sad Song in Saigon shows that a mixed blood, Sairang who suffered from the confusion of his identity and his story fell down to a romance novel because of the weakness of narrative.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.41-66
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• 2019

This paper looks at the readers and publishing strategies of paperback romance novels in the the 1980s based on the 'high-teen' concept. The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning the 'high-teen' concepts as expressed in the media through the publication of paperback romance series in the 1980s. Among paperback romance series, this paper was based on pirated/licensed version of novels published by Harlequin, a Canadian publisher, and the magazine media's advertising promotional phrases that were published targeting the same readers. Since the 1970s, mass media have referred to teenagers as high-teens and called them important consumers. High-teen was a term referring to teenagers in school uniforms, mostly girls, and in the 1980s, 'high-teen' was also introduced as a new consumer market, and the publishing market put forward a number of publishing strategies to attract them. The paperback romance, including , has identified 'high-teen' readers as late-teen girls, sensitive consumers for best-sellers/million-sellers, readers with a tendency to read stories of love, and readers that favor American and Western culture. Since the 1980s, the market for paperback romance has been in the recession, but readers have kept the romance genre alive by accepting and localizing the Harlequin series. With the rise of a new form of media called the 'Web Novel', interest in the romance genre is increasing, and we hope this study will serve as a starting point for a variety of discussions with (women) readers about romance reading/enjoyment.