Korean Literature: Past, Present and Beyond - Project details

The Göttingen State and University Library has one of the largest collections of printed Korean literature in Germany with over 100,000 titles. The collection was made possible through the financial support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) from the 1970s to 2015. Our printed holdings are accessible worldwide via the interlibrary loan system.
In 2015, the funding for the system of „Sondersammelgebiete“ (Special Collections) was stopped by the DFG. It is never the less important to continue collecting Korean literature and to promote it within the broad field of East Asian Studies, the humanities and the social sciences. Here the relevance of Korean literature as a source of knowledge is still not used to its full potential, often neglected in favour of Chinese and Japanese, one reason being the growing popularity of Korea's neighboring countries since the 1980s. East Asia cannot be fully understood without a fair knowledge of Korean culture and history. Our project aims at making our library’s Korean collection more visible and relevant to the academic world and to the public. We focus on topics that have always been of the highest relevance for humanity, within literary studies and within the social sciences: We want to increase the awareness for the importance and value of Korean literature by looking into its literary processing of topics of essential truth.
Our planned activities focus on essential truth such as trust, money, power, fear, love, taboo, faith, hope, that all have been and are subjects within Korean literature, because they are the big topics of humanity that call on people to act.