Ruth Barraclough's Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea breaks new ground in our understanding of gender and labor. Akin to Seung-kyung Kim's English-language ethnography of young women factory workers in the Masan Free Export Zone of the 1980s and Kim Wŏn's study of 1970s' factory girls (yŏgong), this book intervenes in male-centered labor history by placing factory girls' experience, selfhood, and sexuality at the center of the violent shift to industrial society in Korea.Footnote ⁷ Unlike the previous ethnographic and historical studies, however, Barraclough focuses on what she calls “factory girl literature,” literary works about and by factory girls published from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Following Nancy Armstrong's influential study of Victorian novels, Desire and Domestic Fiction, Barraclough posits that modern gender norms play a key role in making middle-class ideology, and that modern fiction functions to disseminate these norms beyond the middle-class “proper.”Footnote ⁸ As Barraclough's narrative attests, middle-class gender norms pervaded both leftist literary writers' representations of factory girls in the 1930s and autobiographical literature by factory girls themselves in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the universalizing power of middle-class ideology reveals its limits in factory girl literature. Korean factory girls strove to fit into the modern gender norm only to find themselves unable to live up to it, whether it meant the Western-influenced free choice of one's lifelong companion through romantic love, the gendered division between the domestic and the public, or the modern version of the traditional virtue of feminine chastity. These women had little choice but to submit themselves to brutal and discriminatory working conditions on the basis of their sex (and their ethnicity during the colonial period) while also exposing themselves to ruthless sexual harassment and violence. Barraclough's sensitive and critical analysis walks us through various moments in which factory girls' sexuality showed its contradictions and complexities. Though vulnerable to sexual violence in their workplaces, they were often viewed by society as unfeminine and sexless; trying to define themselves as sentimental, modern individuals, they nonetheless sought to gain political authority through labor movements.

Dexterously interweaving literary studies with feminist labor history, Factory Girl Literature makes the productive dialogue between the representation of “lived experience” and imaginative narratives. Chapters 1 and 3 rewrite labor history from a feminist perspective while drawing our attention to the significance of female labor and women workers' labor movements in Korea in the 1920s and 1930s and then again in the 1970s and 1980s, notably the two historical junctures where factory girls gained cultural prominence. Chapter 2 analyzes the representations of factory girls in proletarian literature, including the feminist writer Kang Kyŏngae's 1934 novel The Human Predicament (which has been translated into English by Samuel Perry as From Wonso Pond).Footnote ⁹ Chapter 4 examines working-class women's autobiographies published in the 1980s. In Chapter 5 Barraclough turns to “the last great industrial literature in South Korea” (p. 137), Shin Kyŏng-suk's 1995 best-seller novel The Solitary Room, which is based on the author's own experience as a factory girl in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

After reading her nuanced analysis of factory girls' autobiographies of the 1980s in chapter 4, however, I found myself wanting to hear more about how factory girls were represented by mainstream literary authors in the 1970s and 1980s. Given that the literary circle of this time was deeply influenced by the intense labor movement, it would have been useful to compare the mainstream depiction of working-class women with factory girls' self-representations. A more careful job of copy editing would have also enhanced the quality of the book. But these minor blemishes do not distract from appreciating Barraclough's insightful and eye-opening narrative.

With this book we can begin to learn how to listen to factory girls who have remained in the shadow of the myth of the Miracle of the Han River and that of the heroic narrative of dissident movements in Korea. Highly sophisticated yet accessible, Factory Girl Literature is a welcome addition to many fields across disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences and will challenge readers' assumptions about gender, class, and literature.