The Real Modern is a very important work. First of all, it is the first book-length study solely devoted to late colonial period Korean literature. The Real Modern places three prominent Korean writers of the period at its center and introduces their work to English-language scholarship. At the same time, by drawing on the recent scholarship in literary studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies, the book successfully links the material to general concerns about modernity and colonialism, and offers a new view of Korean literary modernism. Furthermore, it calls into question the widely accepted view that Korean literary modernism is merely derived from Western counterparts. Instead of putting Korean literary modernism on the evolutionary scale that prioritizes Western modernism as the original and genuine one, the book emphasizes the creativity of the Korean writers' responses to the crisis of representation resulting from the colonial conditions. It is a significant contribution to the field of Korean studies.

By focusing on Pak T'aewŏn, Kim Yujŏng, and Yi T'aejun, the three canonical writers of the 1930s, The Real Modern challenges the dominant view that insists on a rigid division between realism and modernism. In the conventional history of modern Korean literature, colonial period literature is split into the realist camp that was mainly concerned with faithful depiction of social reality and the modernist camp that was preoccupied with new style of writing. The schism bears on not only artistic but also political differences because realism is conventionally associated with politically inclined literature, which prioritizes the importance of content, and modernism is associated with experimental but apolitical literature, which privileges the importance of form. In The Real Modern, Hanscom criticizes the conventional view for its failure to notice the potentially political implications of a new literary form, such as modernism. In challenging the conventional view, he brings together the seemingly very different works of the three writers under the rubric of modernism. In the conventional history of modern Korean literature, they are rarely read together due to the stylistic and thematic differences, although the three writers' association with the “Group of Nine” is frequently acknowledged. For Hanscom, what they had in common is the suspicion of language as an appropriate medium to represent social and political reality. All three writers came to be frustrated with language because it fails to express what reality really is.

What is most innovative about the book is that it connects the writers' anxiety about language to the colonial modernity of Korea in the 1930s, which brought about what Hanscom calls “the crisis of representation.” According to him, the doubt the three writers had in common about representational language was derived from their frustration with Japanese colonial rule under which the official language of colonial power belied the real conditions of its rule. Thus, the book firmly locates the discrepancy between language and reality in a specific moment of colonial history rather than treating it as a problem of literary theory and philosophy.

The book's approach to the general problem of discrepancy between language and reality in relation to the specific history of Japanese colonialism might lead the skeptic to raise the following questions, which are not easy to convincingly answer: How much did the crisis of representation have to do with the specific situation of Japanese colonial rule over Korea? Does it not have more to do with the general suspicion of language found in modernist discourse? In other words, if the crisis resulted from colonial modernity, as Hanscom argues, did it not have more to do with modernity than with colonialism? In its author's competent hands, however, the book cogently shows the ways in which the crisis of representation in 1930s Korean literature was derived from both modernity and colonialism by carefully reading the three writers' literary texts through their own literary theories.

There are rare moments in the book, however, during which Hanscom seems to conflate related but distinct concepts. He uses such cognate but still significantly distinct terms as “reality,” “the thing,” “object,” “the world,” and “the real” to point to the same referent, that is, what language is supposed to represent. The terms, however, originating from diverse intellectual traditions ranging from metaphysics to Lacanian psychoanalysis, carry significantly different theoretical baggage and require explanation about the relationships with each other.

This quibble cannot detract from what Hanscom has achieved with this book, however. Simply put, The Real Modern is one of the best scholarly works on modern Korean literature I have ever encountered in any language, including Korean. Furthermore, it is appealing to a wide range of readers well beyond the boundaries of Korean studies and East Asian studies because it convincingly presents Korean literary modernism as a case relevant to better understanding the worldwide cultural phenomenon of modernism by expertly reading the Korean writers' critical and literary texts through the meditation of recent literary and cultural theory.