Kim Man-jung (Korean: 김만중; Hanja: 金萬重; 6 March 1637 – 14 June 1692), also romanized as Kim Man-choong, was a Korean novelist and politician. He was one of the eminent Neo-Confucian scholars of the Joseon period.
Kim Man-jung (Korean: 김만중; Hanja: 金萬重; 6 March 1637 – 14 June 1692), also romanized as Kim Man-choong, was a Korean novelist and politician. He was one of the eminent Neo-Confucian scholars of the Joseon period.
Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and storytelling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life and art.
Although metafiction is most commonly associated with postmodern literature that developed in the mid-20th century, its use can be traced back to much earlier works of fiction, such as The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387), Don Quixote Part Two (Miguel de Cervantes, 1615), Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (Johann Valentin Andreae, 1617), The Cloud Dream of the Nine (Kim Man-jung, 1687), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne, 1759), Sartor Resartus (Thomas Carlyle, 1833–34), and Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847).
The Cloud Dream of the Nine, also translated as The Nine Cloud Dream (Korean: 구운몽; Hanja: 九雲夢; RR: Kuunmong), is a 17th-century Korean novel set in the Chinese Tang dynasty. Although widely attributed to Kim Man-jung, there have been some arguments about whether he was the original author. However, as both a Hanmun and fantasy novel, it was not something a Korean scholar of the 17th century would own up to writing. The consensus of the Korean scholarly community is that Kim Man-jung was the author.
It has been called "one of the most beloved masterpieces in Korean literature." It was the first literary work from Korea to be translated into English, by James Scarth Gale in 1922. Richard Rutt's translation entitled A Nine Cloud Dream appeared in 1974. In 2019, Heinz Insu Fenkl published a new translation entitled The Nine Cloud Dream including his lengthy introduction with Penguin Classics which was hailed by The New York Times as one of the most anticipated books of 2019.