Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema sets out to discuss how thematic instances of “crises in masculinity” in literary and cinematic narratives illuminate the traumatic arrival of colonial (and postcolonial) modernity to the Korean Peninsula. Chapter 1 opens the volume by describing how the “New Women” of the 1920s emerged as a symptom of the negative effects of modernity in the works of three colonial Korean male writers. Drawing on existing secondary materials to support readings of the chosen literary texts, this chapter describes how individual aspirations of the New Women were at loggerheads with the Korean male intellectuals' presumably nationalist and anti-colonial objectives. Chapter 2 discusses the Liberation Space (translated in this work as “the Space of Decolonization,” 1945–50) and how selected male authors' perceived guilt of having collaborated with the colonial government is expressed in their works. Chapter 3 returns to what the author refers to as the “question of woman.” Through readings of Yi Pŏm-sŏn's Obalt'an (1959) and Son Ch'ang-sŏb's Pi onŭn nal (1953), this chapter argues that the abundant images of disabled, powerless, and pitiful women in these works suggest a sense of “failure of the national and patriarchal authority that Rhee Syngman's government represents” (p. 63) as well as a “homonational misogyny” in public discourses about women's bodies (p. 65). Chapter 4 returns to the issue of modernity, but now in the context of two early 1960s films, Coachman and Obalt'an, both released in 1961. Through some effective analyses of visual and narrative elements of the two films, this chapter shows how the male characters in both display effectively a sense of liminal subjectivity of the modern man in the context of postcolonial, capitalist South Korea.

Crisis in Gender and the Nation illustrates the split mentality of Korean intellectuals during and immediately after the colonial period as eagerly embracing both modernity and Western culture in particular in order to overcome what was perceived as a stagnant feudal past. Colonial writers are shown as simultaneously being brave pioneers of modern Korean literature, while having to struggle with the burden of being irretrievably tainted by the influence of “modernizing Japan that nourished their artistic imagination” (p. 48). The volume thus makes an interesting point about a paradox where the writers as colonial subjects were endorsing modernity that simultaneously seemed to imbue them with a sense of disempowerment and guilt, which they never seemed to be able to shed even after the Liberation.

However, the volume is not without its shortcomings. In particular, it is curious that while gender is taken as the key thematic concern here, there is no attempt to define it at any point, or to include gender theory to give the readings a clear theoretical or analytical framework. Perhaps as a result, the discussions lean toward the descriptive and attempt to simply interpellate masculinity against negative representations of femininity (or “women”). What is then deduced from these representations is a sense of male anxiety about the loss of “masculine power,” which relates to colonial and postcolonial masculinity. Yet, throughout the book, analyses of literary texts appear to start from a mimetic premise in that fictional characters seem to be equated with people's lived realities rather than being discussed as cultural abstractions. There appears to be a constant insistence on comparing how these literary narratives mirror the life experiences of actual historical characters (e.g., pp. 18 and 25), and thus the reader is given an impression that literary texts here are taken, in part, as a kind of additional resource for explaining the fate of historical women (such as Na Hye-sǒk in chapter 1). Given that the authors discussed are all male and clearly not without bias, the reader is left to wonder what this description of their negative representations of the New Women actually then adds to existing literature about the topic. At the same time, discussions of literary narratives make references to a broader sense of national powerlessness so that it is unclear whether the author believes that desubjectification and objectification of women in literary texts is simply a metaphor to describe the fate of the Korean nation, as she simultaneously appears to suggest that this misogynistic attitude is applied to women's lived realities as well. While on the other hand the readings then gesture toward the symbolic by making some interesting observations on how the representations of female characters in colonial narratives are connected to notions of poverty and of monetary value, there is very little by the way of analysis in trying to convincingly explain the significance of this. As a result, discussions of such complicated pieces as Obalt'an remain on the level of describing the surface structure of the narratives without an analysis of the symbolism that lies beneath and how this informs the very notions of masculinity and femininity in them, and indeed how this relates to modernity. The attempt to deploy Gramsci's notion of the interregnum is initially interesting but not effectively developed, and, in the absence of a clear theoretical framework, the discussions about “women,” “modernity,” and “Koreanness” in selected literary works never develop much further than repeating the well-rehearsed lines about New Women (such as “the New Woman was still caught in the conventions of her time,” p. 10).

The book would have also benefited from more careful editing, as the chapters do not really seem to sit very well together but rather come out as four separate essays, connected loosely by either their thematic focus on masculinity, “woman” (but not “femininity”), or a loosely defined concept of modernity. Chapter 4, despite being the strongest in terms of analysis, seems curiously to stand apart from the rest of the book, and the plot of Obalt'an is resummarized despite having just been discussed at length in the previous chapter. The Romanization of Korean terms is also at times inconsistent with the McCune-Reischauer system. This said, the book can be useful secondary teaching material for discussions about Korean literature and culture-related classes. While translations of Korean literature now abound, works that seek to offer analyses of literary texts are in shorter supply, and as such this work is a welcome addition to the field.