Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings 1880s-1910s Survival As an Ideology of Korean Modernity (Brill's Korean Studies Library)

Abstract

I have been working on Korean Social Darwinism for almost nine years, and have accumulated many debts. No words of acknowledgment will be enough to express the most profound gratitude to these many people who encouraged me, discussed my hypotheses with me, and supported my undertaking in many ways.$e scholars who+rst alerted me to the importance of Social Darwinist ideology for the formation of Korean modernity, were a veteran South Korean historian, Prof. Yi Kwangnin (Sogang University) who pioneered the subject in the mid-1970s, and a Soviet/Russian Korea scholar, Galina Davydovna Tyagai (Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of Science, Moscow), who has been writing on the modern bourgeois ideology of Korea since the1950s. I never met either Prof. Yi or Dr. Tyagai, but always felt inspired by their scholarship.