Reading Daybreak in Korea and KIM Su-Bang and Other Stories of Korea: Korean Converts and American Missionaries as Sisterly Initiative?

Abstract

Westerners visited Korea between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some of them published different genres of writings to recapture their displaced experiences. Among others, this article examines Annie Baird’s Daybreak in Korea (1909) and Ellasue Canter Wagner’s KIM Su-Bangand Other Stories of Korea (1909) from the perspective of travel narratives. Apparently, these American missionaries’ narratives are different from other travel writings, in that both Baird and Wagner do not use the autobiographical “I” to refer to their narrative stance, but employ Korean converts’ multiple voices instead. First, I review the convention of travel narratives. I then examine the ways that Baird and Wagner represent Korean converts in their narratives.