This paper examines three trends of proletarian literature research in British and American Academia after 2010 with six scholarly monographs. Comparing them, I articulate three traits of contemporary South Korean proletarian literature research. First, I analyse two new examples of proletarian literary scholarship which study alienated writings and reinterpret the cannon: The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany, 1863-1933 (Sabine Hake, 2017) and Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde (Samuel Perry, 2014). Secondly, I explore studies which discuss non-orthodox revolutionary subjects and women’s reproductive labour representing a radical vision in Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature (Nathaniel Mills, 2017) and British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work (Roberto del Valle Alcalá, 2016). Finally, I explore the hybrid forms in proletarian literature born in the relationship with other genres with The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Nick Hubble, 2017) and The Proletarian Wave: Literature and Leftist in Colonial Korea (Sunyoung Park, 2015). The current South Korean proletarian literature research trend, which focuses on gender and sexuality, hybrid philosophical characters, critical theory, and comparative perspective, shares similarities with the research I have studied above. Nowadays, the Korean literature researchers’ languages in use, academic backgrounds, and working regions have become diverse. Also, the trend encourages the comparative approach for colonial Korean proletarian literature research. If the comparative studies in the literature research is more active referring to the previous comparative research methodologies for non-western, post-colonial, and non-orthodox working-class literature studies, we might find different Korean singularities.
proletarian literature;gender;reproductive labour;lumpen proletariat;race;antiwork;form;comparative literature studies