History’s popularity, more finely divided

These days, the notes begin, historical works are popular not only on television dramas but in film, and in that vein a wind of historical books is blowing quite strongly in publishing as well. Historical publishing once meant mainly surveys, general histories, and unofficial anecdotes, light story material; lately, much more finely divided historical books — macrohistory and also microhistory, cultural history, art history, customs, daily life, biography — have been well received.

Efforts are also under way, they write, to look at Korea’s modernity from various angles by reconstructing everyday life and customs around keywords such as reading, love, and the railway, and books that help one imagine how lives off the main current survive have likewise been well received. Such results, they say, come of some scholars refusing to stay shut in the frame of a scholarly article and troubling themselves to write for a general public.

Faction, and fusion

The greatest recent feature of publishing trends, they write, is faction, which joins fact to fiction, and fusion, which seeks a joining with other genres. For faction they name The Joseon Kings’ Poisoning Case, which draws the suspicions around a Joseon king’s death as thrillingly as watching a detective play, and which attracts the interest of educated readers as historical material with pleasure and feeling added. Scenes from Joseon’s Back Alleys they offer as an example of the fusion genre: the book reads the findings of literary study through a historical code. In this way historical publishing, seeking a joining with other genres, puts out lighter books that appeal to general readers.

1996, and a direction history books should take

Yu Hong-jun’s My Exploration of Cultural Heritage, they write, led a unifying of historical consciousness in the mass public upon publication, and this began to be explained as the popularization of history. That momentum continued, and even helped make 1996 a year of revival in the humanities. Popular historical publishing began to draw a fairly large picture as it secured a certain readership. But because it is still often led by undergraduate planners and writers rather than specialist historians, it frequently slides into interest for its own sake. Bookshops are full of books that, in the name of popularization, stir nationalist feeling or an inflated ethnic pride. In that current, My Exploration of Cultural Heritage is said to have very great significance in that it shows a direction history books should take. The notes leave the book there, before a later table of trends. The same Korean report is on CampusDown, in a longer form.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Yu Hong-jun’s My Exploration of Cultural Heritage: a boom in finely divided historical publishing, faction and fusion with named examples, 1996 as a year of revival in the humanities, and a warning against empty national pride.

Last updated: 15 November 2026