This volume in the series 'Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century' sees twelve Swedish, Korean and Japanese scholars, theorists, and historians of fiction and non-fiction probe the literary subject of life in 20th century mass dictatorships. Generously defined, the 'literary' in this context covers a wide spectrum of narrative forms, ranging from the commercial television documentary to popular crime fiction, and from digitally restored amateur film on DVD to the Nobel Prize winning novel. It deals with mass dictatorship regimes as far apart as Nazi Germany, Park Chung-hee's South Korea, Stalinist Russia, post-war Hungary, Mao Zedong's China, apartheid's South Africa, and Ceausescu's Romania. The interplay of analytical ideas and the transnational perspectives that this volume brings add a new dimension to our understanding of traumatic events - 'dark chapters' - in 20th century history. By focusing the immense role of imagination within a cultural discourse otherwise dominated by irrefutable facts such as the existence of Holocaust and Gulag, this volume opens new ways of thinking perceptively about trauma, power and self.

As a twentieth century phenomenon, mass dictatorship developed its own modern socio-political engineering system which sought to achieve the self-mobilization of the masses for radical state projects. In this sense, it shares a similar mobilization mechanism with its close cousin, mass democracy. Mass dictatorship requires the modern platform of the public sphere to spread its clarion call for the masses to realize their lofty utopian visions. Far from being a phenomenon that emerged from pre-modern despotic practices, mass dictatorship reflects the global proliferation of quintessential modernist assumptions about the transformability of the individual and society through collective effort. Mass dictatorship therefore utilizes the utmost modern practices to form totalitarian cohesion and to stage public spectacles in the search for extremist solutions to a society's problems. The contributors examine the phenomenon of mass dictatorship along many different lines of inquiry, both theoretical as well as empirical in disparate locations around the globe including Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Interwar Austria, Imperial Japan, Colonial Korea, Colonial Taiwan, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and North Korea.

Mass Dictatorship and Modernity is the second volume in the 'Mass Dictatorship' series. A transnational, academic research venture, it interrogates mass dictatorship in a broad historical context, focusing on the emergence of modernity through interactions of center and periphery, empire and colony, and democracy and dictatorship on a global scale.

This volume in the series Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century series sees twelve Swedish, Korean and Japanese scholars, theorists, and historians of fiction and non-fiction probe the literary subject of life in 20th century mass dictatorships.