Once upon a time, there was the Western singular. Then came pluralization, giving us modernities, philosophies (or, horrifically for some philosophers, rationalities), and also—histories of the novel. In Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea, Ksenia Chizhova positions her study as a contribution to pluralizing the history of the novel, staking great contrastive claims vis-à-vis “the Western novel,” such as “the lineage novel reminds us that emotional complexity is not unique to the cultural logic of Western individualism,” (p. 156) or “subjectivity in the context of the Confucian moral system is distinct from the monadic Western Cartesian subject” (p. 123). The real treasure of this book is the lineage novel, a heroic protagonist in a story about court power, kinship norms, female literacy, and—rare creature!—an “elite vernacular” world in Sinitic Chosŏn Korea. A distinctive socioliterary phenomenon, the genre was gradually rediscovered since the 1960s by South Korean scholars on whose scholarship Chizhova's study rests.

Lineage novels emerged in the late seventeenth century when the patrilineal system, with its social and ritual manifestations, took shape. Reaching its zenith during the eighteenth century, the lineage novels declined in the later nineteenth century and vanished in the early twentieth century, along with the Chosŏn elites and their social order. The extant novels are anonymous manuscripts, often copied by named female scribes and circulating in elite lineage networks. Poised between pleasurable fiction and conduct book moralism, they blend an intense focus on court affairs and status attributes, with narratives of absolute dedication to Confucian moral virtue. They typically feature plots of problematic “unruly feelings” of protagonists, who are ultimately brought back into the fold of kinship norms and bring a preliminary “happy end” in the ever-repeating drama of monumental “genealogical time.” The “elite vernacular” nature of their social world, language, and calligraphy made them unfit to enter the narrative of the early colonial generation of “national literature” scholars in search of premodern “demotic” fiction of the “Korean people.”

Chizhova takes us into this fascinating world along four inroads, in five chapters. Chapter 1 spotlights the kinship novel within a broader spectrum of “kinship textuality,” including various funerary texts and family-based narratives, many of which celebrate female domestic spaces and intimacies with female kin. The next chapter examines how elite women's vernacular brushwork was associated with their competence in “womanly work” but makes an argument for acknowledging the exquisite penmanship of these manuscripts as true “vernacular calligraphy” on a par with male Sinitic “Calligraphy.”

Chapters 3 and 4 treat the genre's distinctive “social and emotional capital”: stories about feelings. Chizhova explores in particular “unruly feelings,” such as resentment, jealousy, sexual desire, even “feelings of flesh and blood,” among women and their natal families, whom they had to leave to enter ritual bonds of obedience to their husbands’ families. These strategically create trouble but show relational rifts and serve as a guide to ultimate reconciliation with kinship norms. The last chapter takes the study chronologically forward to the modern “breakdown of the (Chosŏn) genealogical subject” when a broad readership encountered kinship novels in the commercial book market as an alien blast from a bygone past.

Chizhova deserves praise for presenting this corpus with great empathy and poignant close readings and trouvailles for her devotion to the philologically demanding study of this genre. If there is one point of criticism to offer it might be ideological bias: Chizhova's soldiering for the vernacular-female-elite (against the Sinitic-male-demotic, in complex constellations) repeatedly creates artifacts in the genre's framing in the broader literary and cultural historical landscape. This bias can produce minor issues, such as the absence of discussion of these novels’ “Chinese setting.” More importantly, it leads to an overemphasis and lack of contextualization of the lineage novels in the complex spectrum of Chosŏn narrative and fiction, a much-debated desideratum for a proper premodern literary historiography of Korea. This might also explain the astonishing disinterest in the language and stylistic registers of these novels. The vibrant current debates about “Literary Sinitic” and the complex Sinitic-vernacular modulations across genres—a topic treated extensively and very productively in Si Nae Park's recent work The Korean Vernacular Story—remain unreferenced.Footnote ¹

This lack of the genre's robust contextualization also appears in the broadest layer of this study: the “history” of the Korean novel. As much as the broadly thrown net of scholarship is praise-worthy, brief evocations of local insights on the “late imperial Chinese novel,” European medieval literature, or Bedouin poetry easily result in randomly reductionist and essentializing statements on the Korean/Chinese/Western novel.

Where is the infamous “Cartesian subject” in Don Quixote or even Rousseau's Emile? We need deeper analytic frameworks to figure out the complex phenomenon of early modern Korean fiction across vernacular and Sinitic registers. And we need to develop solid comparative practices. Only they can save us from fallacies induced by superficial “comparative aperçus” and get us to deeper questions about the respective divergent socioliterary worlds and linguistic efficacy of these works in their respective time and place. But overall, this book is a sophisticated and engaging study of early modern Korean lineage novels, and it is highly recommended to anybody with interest in premodern Korea and East Asia, the gender and language politics of literary traditions, and, incidentally, global histories of the novel, which we will need to, comparatively and responsibly, write in the future.