The lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the
early twentieth century. These vast works unfold genealogically, tracing
the lives of several generations. New storylines, often written by
different authors, follow the lives of the descendants of the original
protagonists, offering encyclopedic accounts of domestic life cycles and
relationships. Elite women transcribed these texts--which span tens and
even hundreds of volumes--in exquisite vernacular calligraphy and
transmitted them through generations in their families.
In Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea, Ksenia Chizhova foregrounds
lineage novels and the domestic world in which they were read to recast
the social transformations of Chosŏn Korea and the development of early
modern Korean literature. She demonstrates women's centrality to the
creation of elite vernacular Korean practices and argues that
domestic-focused genres such as lineage novels, commemorative texts, and
family tales shed light on the emergence and perpetuation of patrilineal
kinship structures. The proliferation of kinship narratives in the
Chosŏn period illuminates the changing affective contours of familial
bonds and how the domestic space functioned as a site of their everyday
experience. Drawing on an archive of women-centered elite vernacular
texts, Chizhova uncovers the structures of feelings and conceptions of
selfhood beneath official genealogies and legal statutes, revealing that
kinship is as much a textual as a social practice. Shedding new light on
Korean literary history and questions of Korea's modernity, this book
also offers a broader lens on the global rise of the novel.
