In an increasingly globalized world, reading literature from different cultural worlds has become a nexus of cross-cultural exchange, through which we understand not only the unique elements of each culture but also the universality of human experience and emotions. To examine the ways in which a literary work crosses cultural and national borders, this paper looks at Juhea Kim’s recent historical fiction, Beasts of Little Land, as it serves as an interesting case. Written by an American author of Korean descent, the novel has been successful in the United States; when it was translated and crossed national and cultural borders into South Korea and other countries, it was also well received. It became a finalist for the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and won the 2024 Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award for Foreign Literature.

As the composition, publication, translation and marketing of each novel result from the coordinated efforts by the author, the editor, the publisher, the translator, and the agent, this paper examines the geopolitics and market conditions that might have affected the shape of the novel as well as its reception in different parts of the world. More importantly, this paper offers a close analysis of the novel’s literary and aesthetic properties to understand precisely how it has been able to cross cultural borders successfully.

Later

Writing Maurice in early twentieth-century England, E. M. Forster delicately unfolds the story of closeted homosexual lovers and their exquisite pain. The conflicts imposed upon them by society are beautifully rendered, reminiscent of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy’s poignant depictions of love and loss. Forster, who met Cavafy while stationed in Egypt during the First World War, was deeply influenced by the poet’s ability to infuse his verses with the sorrow of forbidden love. In Maurice, Forster revisits Cavafy’s lovers and, through his own unique narrative style, seeks to overcome their limitations.

The late twentieth-century Korean poet Ki Hyeong-do extends Forster’s exploration of queer pain. His portrayal of gay lovers remains subtle, reflecting a society still unwilling to acknowledge relationships beyond the heterosexual norm. The atmosphere of his poetry echoes Forster’s own frustration with forbidden love, and just as Maurice remained unpublished until after Forster’s death, Ki’s closeted narrative only began to gain recognition posthumously.

By the twenty-first century, the Korean literary landscape embraces a more forthright representation of queer romance. Park Sang-young’s characters openly discuss their sexual and romantic desires, expressing frustration at society’s continued indifference. Unlike Ki’s poetic persona, who seeks sanctuary in Seoul’s anonymity, Park’s protagonists boldly assert their presence. Yet, like their predecessors, his works center on lovers who exist but remain unseen by society.

Across time and geography, these four authors—Forster, Cavafy, Ki, and Park—persistently tell stories of love through the lens of queer romance. Their narratives evolve while simultaneously embracing and erasing one another. A close reading of their works reveals that, in a world unprepared to listen to marginalized voices, these writers turn to love and romance as their focal point, weaving their stories against the backdrop of distinct political, historical, and social contexts: Edwardian England, early twentieth-century Alexandria, Seoul during the democratic movement, and the neon-lit metropolis of twenty-first-century Seoul.

By reading their works, the presentation will demonstrate how the queer narratives of the West and East meet in the genre of the romance.

In my doctoral dissertation, I defined post-Orientalism as a literary discourse that is characterized by contrapuntal, subversive uses of Orientalist tropes, creating spatial topologies that are heterotopic rather than hierarchic. Such narrative frameworks are premised upon the history of Orientalist writing, but they repurpose its exoticism to present an internal critique of Eurocentric discourse.

In this paper, I propose to analyze the fictional library as a post-Orientalist trope, first formulated by Borges in his story “The Library of Babel” (1941). Umberto Eco’s "The Name of the Rose" (1980) mobilizes the trope as a metaphor for mirroring, intertextuality, and “unlimited semiosis,” and notably launches a critique of Eurocentrism by making the library a textually hybrid medieval space, containing the “heretic” works of Arab scientists. The “bibliophilic Orient” (in Timothy Weiss’s words) is not limited to Oriental texts alone, but encompasses a much wider array of texts that interact in a pre-Orientalist setting to produce proto-Orientalist narrative effects. Another key trope that is central to post-Orientalism and plays an important role in Borges’s and Eco’s poetics is the labyrinth – both as a recurrent image and as a form of narration. In their works, the library and the labyrinth become synonymous.

I shall examine Korean author Eunji Park's graphic text "The Mysterious Library: A Colouring Book Journey into Fables" (2016) in conjunction with Haruki Murakami’s "The Strange Library" (2005), and Orhan Pamuk’s "The White Castle" (1985), and Italo Calvino's "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" (1979) to explore the fictional library as a travelling trope in global postmodernist literature. Inspired by Edward Said’s concept of “travelling theory,” I will argue that these non-European postmodernist authors carry the post-Orientalist potential of the trope further, contesting the Borgesian legacy and introducing claustrophobia and melancholy as its narrative effects. Adding to Marina Warner’s analysis in “The Library in Fiction,” my paper will present a new perspective on a popular postmodernist trope that recurs in contemporary world literature, with special reference to the Korean graphic metafictional novel. Since post-Orientalism can be defined as a narrative strategy as well as a critical method, the paper will demonstrate a novel method of approaching world literature.