Invited Talk : Metadata and World Literature in Korean Reading Culture

The talk investigates the cultural and methodological significance of South Korea’s “Complete Selected Works of World Literature” (세계문학전집), a longstanding publishing tradition that has shaped literary taste, national identity, and educational aspiration since the 1950s. Emerging in the aftermath of colonial rule and the Korean War, these multi-volume translation series presented carefully curated foreign literature selections as “complete” canons—embodying both Cold War liberal values and national ambition to align with global modernity through literary culture. In collaboration with the National Library of Korea, this research approaches these collections not only as cultural memory objects, but also as structured, metadata-rich literary datasets. The project demonstrates how metadata functions as an interpretive framework to analyze changing canon formation processes and cultural transmission patterns by compiling bibliographic records, translator profiles, paratextual materials, and retranslation histories. A case study of more than a dozen Korean translations of Jane Eyre illustrates how the novel’s meanings and functions have evolved across different publishing institutions, historical periods, and reader communities. By framing metadata as a form of cultural practice instead of neutral description, this research contributes to existing discussions in digital humanities and translation studies. It highlights the importance of historically and linguistically specific approaches to literary data, especially when translation functions as both an educational instrument and a means of cultivating national reading culture.