Reading Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea

4 Entries | Curated by UCLA Korean History and Culture Digital Museum

Ksenia Chizhova's monograph, Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday, was published in 2021 by Columbia University Press. The book examines the intersection of family, gender, vernacular fiction, and everyday life in Chosŏn Korea.


UCLA students offer their perspectives from having read Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea. Included here are their essays, interpretations, and perspectives.


I created a three-dimensional pop-up artwork that illustrates the importance of women in late Chosŏn period (1600s–1800s) literature and writing. I was inspired by Ksenia Chizhova’s monograph, The Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea (Columbia University Press, 2021), to show that writing in the Korean Peninsula were not always in Classical Chinese, nor were they written solely by elite males.
View Entry | Show on Map

This artwork depicts a scene in the lineage novel, Jade Mandarin Ducks. One of its themes is how the relationship between the father-in-law and the son-in-law affects the daughter-wife’s relationship with her family—in this specific scene, her son. Lineage novels are vernacular Korean texts that have been transcribed by elite Korean women. They then circulate within the family. Besides following…
View Entry | Show on Map

The purpose of this piece is to highlight the impact that Korean Kinship novels had on Korean history. As described in Ksenia Chizhova’s book Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea “Lineage novels are vernacular Korean texts transcribed by elite women and circulated through kinship networks.” (Chizhova 21) However, these novels were more than just written documents. To simply call them texts…
View Entry | Show on Map

The ideology of kinship established the foundation for the social and political spheres of Chosŏn life-influencing the everyday choices and actions of the people, including the king. Thus, learning about kinship helps us in the modern world understand the motives and actions of the people living during the Chosŏn era. But what is kinship? Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea:…
View Entry | Show on Map