Lost Souls is a collection of stories by one of the masters of modern Korean fiction, Hwang Sunwŏn (1915–2000). This anthology of Hwang's short works has been compiled and translated from the Korean by Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton. The book consists of twenty-four short stories—thirteen from the late 1930s, seven from the 1940s, and four from the 1950s. It is divided into three parts: each part is drawn from Hwang Sunwŏn's collections in Korean, entitled The Pond, The Dog of Crossover Village, and Lost Souls, published in 1940, 1948, and 1958, respectively.

Hwang Sunwŏn is one of the representative authors of the “pure literature” school, so named and opposed to “engaged literature” in the South Korean literary-critical debate that began in the early 1960s. The turbulent history of modern Korea—including Japanese colonial occupation, the fratricidal war between North and South Korea, continuing national division, consecutive dictatorships, persistent dissident movements, and intense labor activism in the southern half—resulted in profound politicization of the South Korean literary establishment for decades. The continuing dominance of leftist nationalist critics, known as the “National Literature School” (minjok munhak-p'a), resulted in the overall marginalization of the so-called pure literature, including Hwang Sunwŏn's work. Nonetheless, Hwang is acknowledged by critics, regardless of their ideological orientation, as one of the major and most accomplished authors of modern Korea.

Since South Korea's gradual transition into liberal democracy beginning in the late 1980s, South Korean literary criticism—and literature—has begun a process of diversification in numerous directions. This provocatively eclectic and yet comprehensive volume, introducing Hwang Sunwŏn's important short works of three decades to the English-speaking world, goes a long way in contributing to the contemporary critical rethinking of Korean literature, history, and modernity by bringing our attention to Hwang Sunwŏn's literary world, which for decades has been relegated to the margins in South Korea.

Hwang's works, collected in this volume, deal with a variety of issues considered to have been elided from his literary universe, such as colonial modernization and urbanization, the trauma of the Korean War, and conflicts of ideologies, enabling us to ask a set of questions, made newly relevant both by this volume's astute selection and by changing historical contexts. What becomes of “pure literature” and of the leftist construction and critique of “pure literature” as such in South Korea of the post–Student Movement, post–minjok munhak, and possibly postnationalism? What does Hwang's work teach us in our continuing efforts to critically reconceptualize Korean modernity? Taking seriously the meaningfulness of Hwang Sunwŏn's marginalization in South Korean literary history can help us start to interrogate the privileged notions of the “political,” produced as a result of very specific and constraining contexts, and to reformulate our understanding of the historical formation of modern Korean subjectivity and culture in more complex and open-ended ways. As we reconsider the literary-critical significance of Hwang Sunwŏn at this particular historical juncture, this volume crucially contributes to our exploration of the productive tensions—to be brought out further in our ongoing reexamination of Korean history—between universalism, aestheticism, traditionalism, conservative nationalism—conventionally attributed to Hwang's works—on the one hand, and leftist nationalist literature and criticism and its “politicization” of aesthetics, on the other.

This anthology is a welcome addition to the growing body of Korean literature in English. Its inclusion as part of the existing curriculum at the secondary and postsecondary levels can only further enrich Korean studies, Asian studies, and comparative literary and cultural studies in the English-speaking world. Over the past decades, Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton have contributed to the building of Korean literary studies in the English-speaking world with their superb acumen both as translators of Korean literary works and as editors of anthologies. Their English translation of Hwang's prose in this volume reads as impeccably as their other translations in its literary fluidity and its precise rendering of the etchings of subtle and multivalent structures of sentiments and thoughts in Hwang's narratives. This recent collection, Lost Souls, undoubtedly enhances their stellar publications already in place.