This dissertation examines popular music embedded in and constitutive of a selection of Korean prose fictions composed amidst the three-decade long turbulence of militarization, cold war realignment, and rapid development in the southern part of Korea beginning with liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. It argues that, as powerful vehicles for eliciting collective experiences of nationhood, providing comfort and solace, and embodying feelings of liberation, popular song forms enabled writers to develop unique artistic practices for capturing emotions and experiences of everyday life which could not be depicted through preexisting literary means. Situated at the lacuna between interpretive practices and histories of South Korean popular music and sound media on the one hand, and literary prose and print media on the other, the dissertation is conceptualized around the pressing methodological question of how to develop ways to read Korean fiction informed by the rhythms, lyrics, voices, media, histories, and compositional forms of popular Korean genres and artists. Structured chronologically by decade, the dissertation presents four case studies, each of which reveals a rich terrain of intermedial and intertextual linkages that give insight into how sonic and musical modes of aestheticization have enabled individuals to reclaim, reckon with, and reimagine themselves as the subjects of both their own lives and the collective life of South Korea amidst the crucible of accelerated modernization. The first two body chapters examine military songs (kun'ga) and historical fiction about the Korean War while the remaining two chapters focus respectively on trot (t'ŭrot'ŭ) in connection with semi-autobiographical narratives of hometown return from the 1960s, and psychedelic rock in the context of 1970s youth culture literature. Through these analyses, the dissertation constructs a more comprehensive and integrated cultural history of popular music and literature in postwar South Korea, challenging and enriching existing disciplinary boundaries.