These two monographs by Nayoung Aimee Kwon and Ji-Eun Lee join a small group of books appearing over the past couple of years that are enriching our understanding of the modern experience in colonial Korea within the field of literary studies. Written by scholars who came of age as postcolonial theory held sway in humanities and East Asian studies departments, these books are beginning to fill out the lacuna so often noted in works of postcolonial theory, which is the experience of living in the Japanese—a non-European—empire. Just as postcolonial theory followed on the trail of colonial discourse studies, these books in Korean literary and cultural studies are bringing the study of the experience of the colonized population to previous studies of the Japanese empire and imperialism.

To speak of the colonial experience in the case of Korea is to speak of modernity. These recent publications are also significant because they mark the institutionalization of modern Korean literary studies in the English language. It should perhaps not be surprising that studies of modern literature from around the world often begin from their putative “origins,” whether to narrate a teleological history or to bring such a history into question and explore some key assumptions about a modern national literature, as is the case here with explorations of the gendering and presumed monolingualism of “Korean literature” respectively. In the emerging field of Anglophone modern Korean literary studies, the concept of colonial modernity has functioned as a way both to interrogate the origins of Korean modernity and to establish a conversation with the wider academy through the medium of postcolonial studies.

Although the term “colonial modernity” has become ubiquitous in both English and Korean-language scholarship, few scholars take the time to interrogate the term and the stakes involved in its use, in other words to make it a truly useful concept. How refreshing then to read Nayoung Aimee Kwon's wonderful introduction to her book Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan. As Kwon describes it, colonial modernity is a paradoxical concept not because coloniality and modernity are inherently contradictory, but because a contradiction between the two has been produced and discursively imposed to the point where they appear not to be coeval (p. 9). What is actually co-constitutive has been separated out, with the result that it becomes impossible to recognize the modernity of the colonized, and from this “conundrum of representation” derives both a universalization of imperial culture and a series of disavowed histories of coeval collaboration that continue on into the postcolonial era. Kwon redefines colonial modernity as “the experience of modernity in colonial subjection whether through actual colonial domination or the hegemonic power and occupation of the West, both real and imagined” (p. 10). This allows Kwon to account for the complex triangulation of forces operating in the colony of a non-Western empire in an age of Western hegemony. The binary of colonizer/colonized is thus complicated not only by unstable “internal” borders but also by the ongoing subjugation of both sides to other empires. This geopolitical situation impacts the collaborative encounters that are the focus of Kwon's book. Meanwhile, the “conundrum of representation,” which lies at the center of Kwon's understanding of colonial modernity, is further defined through five different elements: conundrums of (modern) subjectivity, of language, of history, of aesthetic representation of form and content, and of recognition. The “colonial modern subject” lives with this lack of recognition of his or her history, language, and aesthetic forms, and the right of nationhood. Kwon stresses that all of these elements persist into postcolonial times, bringing about the disavowal of various aspects of colonial history, which characterizes the postcolonial nation and scholarship on colonial-era Korea.

The heart of Kwon's book elaborates the historical nature of these representational crises through case studies that involve various cultural exchanges between writers and artists from Korea and Japan. Kwon takes up three major figures from late colonial Korea who lived the representational crisis in a particularly fraught and intense manner: the two writers who achieved considerable success in Japan with their Japanese-language writings—Kim Saryang and Chang Hyŏkchu—and the less likely figure of the female, non-elite writer Kang Kyŏngae, whose work was occasionally translated into Japanese at the time. Due to their very public bilingual careers, Kim and Chang are the most obvious figures to discuss in a study such as this, but I appreciated the way that Kwon linked their work to the broader colonial cultural scene through the ideas of the colonial abject and colonial kitsch. Kwon mobilizes the concept of the abject to describe these bilingual writers whose existence is always “in-between” and thus a threat that “does not respect borders.” If the abject posed a threat, kitsch functioned as one way to attempt to tame that threat as mainstream Japanese imperial culture moved to consume colonial Korean objects and art as local, folksy, exotic, or romantically antique. Kwon follows the travails of Chang Hyŏkchu in his attempt to collaborate with the Japanese dramatist Murayama Tomoyoshi on a Japanese-language production of the heralded folk tale Ch'unhyang—a production that toured in both Japan and on the Korean peninsula. The much briefer discussion of Kang allows Kwon to further complicate the boundaries of both the colony (through Kang's migration to Manchuria) and language (through work that was presumably translated into Japanese rather than composed in the imperial language).

In between these case studies is a fascinating—and perhaps the most original—chapter on the colonial-era roundtables in which cultural figures from throughout the empire regularly got together to discuss contemporary affairs. By utilizing the idea of “overhearing” and carefully reading through the different published versions of the roundtables appearing in both Korean- and Japanese-language publications, Kwon is able to tease out the staged nature of this media form and the ambiguity produced through its translation from speech to written characters and from one language to another. It is a good example of how a text-based discursive study can contribute to our understanding of minor forms, which are more commonly considered mere information or propaganda.

Kwon's book will become an instant classic of the postcolonial theory approach to colonial Korea's literary scene. As such it shares both the strengths and weaknesses of postcolonial theory itself. Its focus on the in-between figure of the bilingual allows it to complicate the phantasms of nation, mother tongue, and a clear boundary between the colonial and imperial. It thus brings attention to the postcolonial discourses of national origin and essence that have been retrospectively cast back onto a disavowed colonial past and that continue to animate contemporary discussions of culture and identity in East Asia. Its weakness lies in the tendency of postcolonial theory to universalize elite experience of anxiety and discursive disruption as the paradigmatic colonial modern experience. Such an experience is surely significant in the study of literary texts, but colonial modern subjection certainly took other forms as well—subjections to poverty, class, violence, perhaps even monolingualism. Nevertheless, the fact that Kwon's book so clearly elucidates this approach to colonial modernity will make it incredibly helpful for teaching. It will join a fairly vibrant Anglophone literature on bilingual writers in East Asian literary studies—including previous work on Kim Saryang and Chang Hyŏkchu—and will be of interest to those who study colonial cultures more generally.

Ji-Eun Lee's study, Women Pre-scripted: Forging Modern Roles through Korean Print, takes a more expansive, chronological approach to discussions about women in modern print media. By focusing on key publications from the late nineteenth century through the mid-1930s, Lee reconstructs the ways in which modernity for women entailed confronting women as a new category, through which elite men debated the course of the process of modernization and the state of the colony/nation. In this sense, Lee argues, women's role was always prescripted—decided by others and promulgated in reams of print.

After beginning with a helpful chapter on women in book culture in premodern times, Lee moves through four case studies of newspapers and journals and the debates they published on the question of women: the Tongnip sinmun or Independent (1896–99); the T'aegŭk hakpo, Kajŏng chapchi, and Yŏjajinam (published around 1906–8); and the journals synonymous with the New Woman, Sinyŏja (1920) and Sinyŏsŏng (1923–34). These different journals—most of them little known or discussed in previous English-language scholarship—take us from the age of the Great Han Empire through the era when Korea was first a protectorate and then a formal colony.

Colonialism is here more of a background, however, than an object of study. Instead Lee's concerns lie in the emergence of a modern discourse about women, first in the early and often nationalistic newspapers, and then in the first commercial journals published with a predominantly female readership in mind. Lee is interested in the relationship between women and print culture, whether as readers or as writers, and so her project might be understood as a kind of feminist book history that focuses on the emerging roles of women in modernity.

Lee describes her own methodology as a kind of literary reading of journals, which allows her to account for contradictions and nuances in the articles and editorials she discusses. In fact, each chapter is bookended with a reading of mostly fictional texts, which are tantalizing and offer a welcome balance to the discussion of the articles inside the journals. Those articles, predominantly written by elite men with a pedagogical purpose, tend perhaps not surprisingly to reinscribe the role of the modern woman within the home. In some ways, therefore, the chronological structure of the book brings about frustration that women have not yet become what the twenty-first-century reader wants them to be. We feel this in Lee's repeated declarations of the nonprogressive nature of early “feminist” discourse. However, the fictional bookendings, some of which are written by early modern women writers, tell a far more complex tale of women's modern experience and offer evidence of their active participation in producing their own meaning. Although Lee's main focus is on discussions about women, her placing of these other writings at the headings of her chapters seems to point to a sense of dissatisfaction with the knowledge that the magazine articles are yielding her and with the idea of a book on discussions about women rather than writings by women.

Lee's work would benefit from Kwon's theorization of modernity, which would allow Korea to be seen as coeval rather than a passive recipient of an already-completed “Western modernity.” We might then better be able to appreciate the politics of the particular fashion in which woman emerged in Korean modernity rather than seeing her as always incomplete. Lee correctly points out that the “old” woman does not exist until the “new woman” has been coined, but the full implications of that statement are not worked out here and an ideal woman hovers on the horizon in the shape of a purportedly “Westernized” and liberated female. If the New Woman sometimes does not feel feminist to a reader today (although often she appears daringly so), then how does she fit into her own social and political environment? And if woman became a figure for a discussion of national and social problems, how did women reconcile that with their own dreams?

Lee's ambitious study has done a good job of introducing the question of women in print culture and, as she often reminds the reader, there is more work to be done for which she has prepared a base. She raises provocative questions about the relationship between women and genre, women and script, and women and the nation/colony. For those of us teaching Korean literary and cultural history in English, there are few fields with as ample a selection of published translations as women's literature. Lee's critical survey will be a welcome addition to translations of women's fiction and recent publications such as Hyaeweol Choi's wonderful New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2013). Lee's book is well written and accessible to both graduate and undergraduate students. Together, Lee's and Kwon's books contribute immensely to the emerging field of Korean literary studies.