Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection

An Annotated Selection

Edited by Young-mee Yu Cho and Sungmin Park; By William Eilliot Griffis

Rutgers University Press

William Elliot Griffis (1843 – 1928) graduated from Rutgers College in 1869 and taught four years in Fukui and Tokyo. After his return to the United States, he devoted himself to his research and writing on East Asia throughout his life. He authored 20 books about Japan and five books about Korea including, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882), Corea, Without and Within: Chapters on Corean History, Manners and Religion (1885), The Unmannerly Tiger, and Other Korean Tales (1911), A Modern Pioneer in Korea: The Life Story of Henry G. Appenzeller (1912), and Korean Fairy Tales (1922). In particular, his bestseller, Corea: The Hermit Nation (1882) was reprinted numerous times through nine editions over thirty years. He was not only known as "the foremost interpreter of Japan to the West before World War I but also the American expert on Korea. After his death, his collection of books, documents, photographs and ephemera was donated to Rutgers.

The Korean materials in the Griffis Collection at Rutgers University consist of journals, correspondence, articles, maps, prints, photos, postcards, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and ephemera. These papers reflect Griffis's interests and activities in relation to Korea as a historian, scholar, and theologian. They provide a rare window into the turbulent period of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Korea, witnessed and evaluated by Griffis and early American missionaries in East Asia. The Korea Letters in the William Elliot Griffis Collection are divided into two parts: letters from missionaries and letters from Japanese and Korean political figures. Newly available and accessible through this collection, these letters develop a multifaceted history of early American missionaries in Korea, the Korean independence movement, and Griffis's views on Korean culture.

Painstakingly compiled and meticulously researched, this should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of Korean studies or Korea’s relations with the West.’
Daniel Pieper, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Cho and Park’s richly annotated collection will be a significant resource to scholars of modern Korean history, Protestant missions in East Asia, and Korean-Japanese relations. Moreover, Korea Letters undoubtedly will provide seed material for future research projects.’
Joseph M. Henning, editor of Interpreting the Mikado's Empire: The Writings of William Elliot Griffis

YOUNG-MEE YU CHO is a professor of Korean at Rutgers University. She published Integrated Korean, Korean Photographs in the William Elliot Griffis Collection, Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices, You Call That Music?! Korean Popular Music through the Generations, and Rereading Chang Lee Wook.

SUNGMIN PARK co-authored two book chapters on the Griffis Collection published in Beyond the Book and The William Elliot Griffis Collection at Rutgers University Library. Currently, she works as the special formats cataloger/repository librarian at The College of New Jersey.

FERNANDA H. PERRONE is an archivist, head of the of the Exhibitions Program and curator of the William Elliot Griffis Collection in the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick.

ROSS KING is a professor of Korean language and literature at the University of British Columbia.

SOO HUR is a professor of history at Seoul National University, Korea.

Acknowledgments
Foreword by Fernanda H. Perrone
Fragments of Information Across the Borders by Soo Hur
An Appreciation: The Korea Letters and Manuscripts in the William Elliot Griffis Papers and Anglophone Knowledge Production about Korea, 1888-1927 by Ross King
Introduction
Part I Letters from Missionaries