Love and/or Revolution?: Fictions of the Feminine Self in the 1930s Cultural Left

Dooling, Amy D.

doi:10.1057/9781403978271_4

Cited by 1 publication

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“…In her study of the so-called "love plus revolution" genre (aiquing jia geming) in Chinese leftist literature, Amy Dooling notes how the late 1920s emergence of the genre, whose theme centered on the conflict between one's private romantic sentiments and public revolutionary aspirations, marked a transitional point from the earlier romantic socialist literature to the later more dogmatic one. 57 Such a transition was also discernible in Korean proletarian literature of the same period. Previously, the expression of romantic sentiments was regarded as the core attribute of the autonomous modern individual subject, and socialist writers would uncontroversially conjoin the practice of free love with the pursuit of socialist revolution in their fictions.…”

Section: Critiquing Socialist Patriarchy: No Love No Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyǒngae and 1930s Socialist Women's Literature

Park¹

2013

Positions: Asia Critique

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In the early 1930s, a new group of women writers with a leftist inclination emerged on the Korean literary scene. Some critics have questioned the feminist commitment of these writers, suggesting that their works may have subordinated the cause of women's liberation to that of a socialist revolution. In critically assessing this view, this article embeds the works of women writers in their contemporary social and cultural context. The focus of discussion throughout are the works of Kang Kyǒngae, perhaps the most prominent and representative writer of the group. Leftist women such as Kang, it is argued, espoused socialism not as an alternative to feminism but as a variant feminist outlook in order to address the interest of lower-class women. Kang's portraits of proletarian women contested from a class perspective the contemporary cult of domesticity, which was promoted by both colonial authorities and Korean nationalists. And while Kang refrained from openly confronting the socialist patriarchy, she criticized it in its quotidian form, the chauvinism of leftist male intellectuals. Alongside a socialist commitment, the suggestion is that leftist women's literature had a genuinely feminist function within the discursive environment of colonial Korea.

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Section: Critiquing Socialist Patriarchy: No Love No Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyǒngae and 1930s Socialist Women's Literature

Park¹

2013

Positions: Asia Critique

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Love and/or Revolution?: Fictions of the Feminine Self in the 1930s Cultural Left

Cited by 1 publication

References 2 publications

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyǒngae and 1930s Socialist Women's Literature

Rethinking Feminism in Colonial Korea: Kang Kyǒngae and 1930s Socialist Women's Literature

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