Review of “Moving Beyond Politics: Western Scholarship on Joseon”

Kye examines the article Moving Beyond Politics: Western Scholarship on Joseon. The article reviews the research trends on the Joseon period (15th to 19th centuries), to include the Korean Empire period (1897-1910), in Western English-language academic communities over the past century or so and across varying subjects. The essay somewhat lacks a review and critique of research trends. Absent as well is any historiographical investigation of the characteristics of books written by non-historians between the 1880s and 1940s; of why scholarly works on Joseon appearing during the 1960s and 1970s deal mainly with the nation foundering amidst the changing international order in East Asia during the second half of the 19th century; or of the common interests or traits of studies made on Confucianism from the 1980s.