Writers of the Winter Republic examines South Korean dissident literature during the last decade of the dictator Park Chung Hee's rule before his assassination in 1979. By expertly interweaving a close textual analysis with an informative overview of the historical context, the book offers an illuminating literary, cultural, and political history of the era.

Here, I will focus on three major aspects of the book's significance. First of all, it is the first book-length study of 1970s South Korean literature in the English language. The primary focus of the book lies on four renowned literary figures of the period—Kim Chi-ha, Yi Mun-gu, Cho Se-hŭi, and Hwang Sŏk-yŏng—and their works. Compared with recently published books in Korean literary studies, the majority of which tend to emphasize transnational aspects of their subjects, Youngju Ryu's book unreservedly places South Korean writers and their literature at its center, introducing the lives and writings of the literary figures of the 1970s to English-language scholarship. Although Ryu pays due respect to the authors and their works throughout the book, she does not blindly celebrate them. She critically evaluates their literary and political achievements and limitations. A case in point is her nuanced critique of the gender dynamics in Hwang's “Dream of Strongman,” which privileges male virility as the locus of subaltern solidarity and marginalizes a female voice.

Second, the book expands the scope of scholarship on the era of Park Chung Hee's rule, the most important period of South Korean history economically, politically, and culturally, as Ryu illustrates well. Although there is constant interest in Park Chung Hee and the era of his rule among scholars based in the United States, the majority of their works have been concentrated in political science, sociology, and economic history. Ryu's book redresses this imbalance. Ryu's book is especially good at historicizing the literary texts in the turbulent time of modern Korea by connecting them to the specific cultural, social, political, and economic settings of Park's military coup and resultant dictatorship.

Third, by focusing on 1970s South Korean literature, Ryu also attempts to explore the relationship between politics and literature. Through her close reading of texts and lucid contextualization of contemporary South Korean intellectual discourse, Ryu concludes that the ultimate political value of literature is to resist the socioeconomic forces that render “human life less than humanly livable.” Regardless of all the heated debates about the demise of modern literature after the restoration of electoral democracy in South Korea, where literature is not valued as a weapon against political oppression, Ryu argues, as long as people feel their lives are not humanly livable enough, literature can still be politically valuable because it can help them see behind dreary reality what fundamentally makes humanly livable life impossible and thus lead them to hope for change to the status quo.

Ryu's gallant endeavors to uphold the political relevance of literature lead to a very important question that is not explicitly tackled in the book—what enables literature to resist the social, political, and economic forces that make humanly livable life impossible, whether they result from the authoritarian state or neoliberal capitalism? Put differently, from what does literature derive its political power, the power of literature that even the authoritarian state of Park Chung Hee's regime feared (p. 9)? Ryu explains that literature was “the frontline of the resistance against” Park's authoritarian regime because it was viewed as “the last line of defense for intellectual freedom” (p. 19). If so, what makes literature the privileged realm of intellectual freedom? Is it the author's intention reflected in the text, the reader's reception of the text, the collaboration between the author and the reader for creation by exercising freedom à la Jean-Paul Sartre, or the significance of the text, akin to Theodor W. Adorno's notion of truth content, which is neither exhaustively attributed to the author's intention nor dependent on the reader's interpretation alone but ensues from the dialectic interplay between the effects of the text and its sociopolitical context?

The implicit answer Writers of the Winter Republic alludes to is it is eventually the author's intention materialized in the message of the text. Thus, when discussing Cho Se-hŭi's A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, Ryu ultimately relies on the authorial authority of Cho's insistence on the political relevance of the novel to contemporary South Korean society in order to refute the revisionist interpretation of it as a “postmodern critique of metaphysics” (p. 108). Despite Ryu's cogently presented argument, the validity of which is backed up by her admirably executed textual analysis, the privileging of authorial intent leaves me wondering whether it might not run the risk of limiting the openness of text, which has its own political valence of subversiveness. Such openness of text is also important in the tradition of Marxist literary theory, as epitomized by György Lukács, who read progressive elements into the works of such conservative writers as Sir Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac regardless of their authorial intention.

The above question elicited by Ryu's book portends the possibility of further questions opened by her excellent study of 1970s South Korean literature. Writers of the Winter Republic confirms that a good scholarly work always leaves its readers with questions with which it is worth further engaging.