From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea

From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men joins a steadily growing list of studies of modern Korean literature and offers a significant contribution to the field through its insightful engagement with gender and the modern subject in the domestic fiction of early colonial Korea. Yoon Sun Yang examines novels that were produced between 1906 and 1918, as well as some short stories and novels of the early 1920s, as demonstrations of how historical and cultural circumstances drove the shifting literary representations of the modern subject. A theoretical sinew of this book is translation—not in the sense of text-to-text translation, but translation as a complex process in which the European notion of the modern subject was indigenized in both the national and colonial contexts. Through this solid and innovative theoretical underpinning, together with close readings of some of the most representative works of the time by Yi Injik, Yi Haejo, Kim...