This paper categorized by generation the trends in Korean literature research over the past sixty years, examining the changes in methodology and academic interest. Modern scholarship began with the establishment of universities, and the first generation of scholars were mostly those who had majored in Korean language and literature in the Korean Language and Literature department of Kyungseong Imperial University, as well Enlightenment period intellectuals who had studied primarily in Japan. The second generation of scholars, who were educated by the first generation at universities after liberation from Japan in 1945, founded the Society of Korean Language and Literature and began their academic activities in earnest. The research trends for each generation of scholars from the second to the fifth can be summarized as follows.
The research of the second generation of scholars may be called positivistic, but they were obsessed with studying historical evidence and neglected the analysis of actual literary works. They also focused their inquiries on the origins and formations of genres, drawing such naive conclusions as the idea that later genres were born of the earlier genres they were studying.
The period from the 1970s to the 1990s, during which the second and third generation were both active in research, was a time rife with a variety of trends, including formalism, structuralism, criticism of myth, analytical psychology, phenomenology, and the sociology of novels. As a result, there were improvements in certain areas of Korean literature research and not a few contributions were made to the scholarship. It was a time when newly-emerging theories in the science of literature were sought out and tested against one another.
The fourth generation is the generation that plays the leading role in academic circles today, and there is no doubt that they have extensively examined materials that had escaped the attention of previous research and are engaged in more meticulous discussions. However, they focus on their specific fields of specialization and tend to neglect adjacent fields.
The fifth generation are the young scholars who have not yet established generational characteristics, but their critical consciousness is not particularly new and they are not as interested in foreign theories as the previous generation. In addition, the realist view of literature has faded and the unrealistic fantasy that had been rejected previously is now being discussed in a positive light.
To summarize the recent tendencies in Korean literature research, it can be said that meticulous research is being carried out in each field of study as scholarship becomes specialized, and comparative research that compares Korean literature with foreign literature in similar genres is becoming more lively as more detailed inquiries are being made on narrower collections of materials. However, there are no efforts being made to synthesize and systematize these specialized results. There is a need for research that can integrate new findings and develop them as general theories. Scholars need to set their sights on writing new introductions to or histories of Korean literature and engage in more systematic research.