Flow and Irony: Locating Literary Modernity in Hahn Moo-Sook's Retrospective Gazes

Before the twentieth century, the female presence in Korean literature was largely a construct of patriarchal imagination, with women held up merely as exemplars for all others to emulate. The twentieth century brought wider exposure to Western culture, and Korean feminists began laying a foundation for woman's social engagement and equality. Hahn Moo-Sook was born during the early waves of the feminist literary movement and lived to write through tumultuous times of war, division, and political upheavals. This essay discusses Hahn's literary world in terms of her egalitarian vision of history as witnessed by underprivileged class and gender; her early vision of modernity wavering between the world of the novel and of the romantic tale in And So Flows History; and the flowering of her modernist style in several of her later works.