Spencer Lee-Lenfield
Abstract Younghill Kang’s 1931 novel The Grass Roof, long taken as the first commercially successful novel by a Korean in English, is unusual for incorporating sixty-five of its author’s translations of East Asian poetry into its narrative fabric. These embedded translations represented one of the early mass audiences for Korean poetry in English. This article argues that The Grass Roof adapts the literary convention of inset poetry (sabipsi) from the premodern Korean novel, hybridizing it with English-language autobiographical fiction. It proves Kang knew traditional narrative models by analyzing his depictions in the novel of the Kuunmong and Ch’unhyang chŏn. It then examines two different uses of inset poetry in the novel: (1) retrospective ornamentation by the narrator and (2) dynamic plot advancement by characters. The second function, in particular, reflects classical uses of sabipsi to heighten scenes of courtship and erudition. Kang’s use of inset poetry gave Korean poetry an unusually early global audience at the same time as it drew Western and Korean novelistic techniques together in a new, shared experiment.