The Manga Boom: The Recent Fairy-Tale Transculturation Between Germany and East Asia

Abstract

This dissertation critically investigates how German culture is transculturated in Japan and in South Korea and then reproduced in a new form of manga/manhwa. These visual representations are evidence of a long history of German literary transculturation amid Japanese and Korean reading culture. Beginning with moral education materials in the 1880s, I trace the widespread reception of Grimms' fairy tales in East Asia and argue that the success of the translations of the tales was due to the particularly successful fusion of Confucian values with the Western story form. German literature first entered the Japanese reading culture through the Grimms' fairytales as a moral education tool. The reading reception shifted from educational space to private space and Japanese reader began to enjoy the Grimms' fairytales outside of the classroom, which contributed to the spread of German literature. This led to a veritable Grimm boom at the end of the twentieth century, including a corpus of critical analysis by Asian scholars and fairy tale retellings from feminist perspectives that creatively fuse ideas of East and West. The globalization of manga, in turn, contributed to the scholarly discourse in the West, which nourished a rethinking and redeployment of complex borrowing practices between Asian and German literatures. From the impact of Grimms' fairy tales, I trace the reception of the German literature in the Japanese pop literature medium manga and analyze Grimms Manga by the Japanese manga artist Kei Isiyama. Grimms' fairy tales paved the way for the entry of German literature and I investigate Yoko Tawada's works, who writes in Japanese and in German and incorporates fairy tale tropes and the legacy of German romanticism in the age of transnational globalization through her visual descriptive writing. I examine the Japanese author Kouhei Kadono, whose works, I claim, display the romantic themes of the German Romantics and Richard Wagner's nationalistic ideological views of societal changes. I then shift from German literature' influence in Japan to South Korea and I juxtapose the manhwa The Tarot Café with Goethe's Faust to investigate gender roles. After displaying German transculturation in the selected works, I argue that manga contributes to the German classroom as part of a multiliteracies framework in a collegiate language classroom.