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 Kyoje, and Yi Kwangsu, among others, Yang makes a compelling argument that the notion of “individuality” or “the individual” came into being gradually at the turn of the century through the figures of enlightened women in domestic novels. She thus challenges the established view that this theme first emerged in young male figures in Yi Kwangsu's The Heartless (1917), and that the portrayals of these figures’ “unsettling and even radical” relationship to their nation and family showcased male elites’ desire to “contribute to the colonized nation's progress and to secure their cultural hegemony” (p. 180).

The body of works examined in this book, which is commonly referred to as the New Fiction (sin sosŏl), has been studied quite extensively in Korea since colonial times. Having been generally considered “incomplete” for its lack of features supposedly found in the form, content, and style of “modern literature,” it is often called a literature of a “transitional period” (p. 4). As the works are imbued with didactic content, namely the brazen promotion of national progress in education and domestic reform, scholars’ attention has largely focused on the political philosophy embedded in the New Fiction. Furthermore, research on the New Fiction was heavily colored by nationalist historiography until the mid-1990s, when these writers were evaluated according to a rigid ideological binary: pro- and anti-colonial. When it comes to the female figures in the New Fiction, scholars tend to diagnose the idealization of the enlightened “good wives and wise mothers” as a sign of modern patriarchal nationalism. Yang provides a comprehensive and concise explanation of this previous scholarship on the New Fiction, as well as a thoughtful and refreshing reappraisal, by raising critical issues surrounding the ideological readings of female figures in the genre and by drawing from important sources beyond literature, such as newspapers and magazines.

Yang's reading of the selected texts, particularly their female characters, is thought-provoking. The first two chapters examine Yi Injik's works, probably the two most discussed novels in the New Fiction scholarship: Hyŏl ŭi Nu (Tears of Blood, 1906) and Ch'iaksan (Mt. Ch'iak, 1908, 1911). By comparing Yi's works with Victorian and American domestic novels, Yang interrogates the symbolic meaning of old-fashioned yangban (aristocratic) women, in contrast to the previous scholarship's attention to forward-looking young women. She works against the common assumption of yangban women as an emblem of the “uncivilized state of Korea” (p. 64). Instead, she reads these figures as a hybrid, as victims of Japanese imperialism, a sign of the unpredictability of the national community, and remnants of the uncivilized past.

As discussed in the third chapter, the old-fashioned hybrid female figures also challenge patriarchal Confucian morality in Yi Haejo's Pak Chŏng Hwa (A Coldhearted Flower, 1910) and Yi Injik's Moranbong (Peony Hill, 1913), in which the figure of “the femme fatale” (as Yang labels her for her sexual aggression and criminal behavior) in fact displays male writers’ attempts to “overcome their abjection and regain their symbolic power” (p. 122).

The exploration of the femme fatale continues in chapter 4 with analysis of the same-sex marriage in Kim Kyoje's Kyŏng Chung Hwa (Flowers in the Mirror, 1923). The female bond in a domestic space, Yang argues, speaks to the existence of alternative forms of the modern subject.

Likewise, the figures of “sensitive young men” in short stories by Chang Ŭngjin, Hyŏn Sangyun, and Yang Kŏnsik, as discussed in the final chapter, are more than the expression of young male elites’ desire for their nation's progress: they signify a turning point in modern Korean literature in which the figures of domestic women no longer function as a channel for elites to manifest their desire.

Considering how the translation of the European notions of the individual and individuality mostly came to Korea via Japan, a discussion of the Japan connection to the translation process could have strengthened the cross-cultural content of the book. Furthermore, a fuller treatment of the historical context of premodern Korean fiction and Victorian and American fiction could have provided, however briefly, a better rationale for the book's already captivating comparative analysis. But these minor issues do not lessen the important contribution Yang makes. Due to its careful treatment of the literature of the “transitional period” that has been rarely taken up in the English-speaking world, From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men is a must-read for scholars and students of modern Korean literature and culture. And its theoretically invigorating and ingenious analyses of the selected works contribute to multiple fields beyond Korean studies, including comparative literature and culture, translation studies, and critical gender studies.