Introduction

It goes without saying that the task of bringing together a collection of essays into a single, arguably cohesive collection is an arduous one, the progress of which may be held up not only by the various necessary rounds of writing, proofreading, editing, and rewriting, but also by any of an infinite number of unexpected curves that life often throws both editor and contributors. Such was most certainly the case with this special issue, which has, unfortunately, faced delays, setbacks, and roadblocks of all sorts. Somehow, though, given the extreme importance of the interruptions, postponements, and delays that characterize South Korean cinema and television dramas, these obstacles seem particularly fitting. In fact, in the time that has elapsed between the conceptualization and the appearance of the present volume, a number of significant developments have taken place that have changed the landscape of South Korean media culture--events and transformations that illustrate the undeniable links between cinema, culture, and politics. At the time of the initial call for papers, the South Korean media industry was still reaping the financial and cultural rewards of the so-called "Korean Wave," as television dramas and films experienced unparalleled success, both at home and abroad. Because this phenomenon took shape relatively quickly, the demand for works on South Korean media culture available in English was greater than the supply. This is not to suggest that there were no important resources available to the researcher and/or aficionado: Anthony Leong's Korean Cinema: The New Hong Kong (Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2002) provided a solid overview of the trends and themes met with in what would eventually come to be known as "New Korean Cinema," while Hyangjin Lee's Contemporary Korean Cinema: Culture, Identity, and Politics (Manchester, Manchester UP, 2001) and Eungjin Min, Jinsook Joo, and Han Ju Kwak's Korean Film: History, Resistance, and Democratic Imagination (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) offered extended historical analyses of the development and evolution of cinema in South Korea, from its origins under Japanese occupation, through to the period immediately following the East Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. Nancy Abelmann's The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in contemporary South Korea (Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2003) examined the ways in which Korean women made sense of their lives using models drawn from popular media texts, while Kyung Hyun Kim's The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Durham: Duke UP, 2004) took an equally gender-focused approach, examining how significant shifts in the representation of gender in South Korean films from the 1980s to the present have served both to reflect and to analyze perceptions and performances of masculinity in the contexts of historical, social, and political change.