This episode of the Korea Now podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Ksenia Chizhova. They speak about the practice of calligraphy in late Choson Korea, the highly aestheticized craft and the social importance attached to it, the differences between traditionally male and female calligraphy, the meticulous training processes involved, the different moral and character insights that the practice was said to offer unto their authors, the male domination of the practice in terms of public presence and prestige, and the niche that women calligraphers claimed for themselves often within the private domain.

Ksenia Chizhova is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies Director of Undergraduate Studies at Princeton University.  Her areas of interest are history of emotions, family, and scriptural practices in Korea, from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. Her first manuscript, Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday, published by Columbia University Press, looks into the rise and fall of the lineage novel (kamun sosŏl), which narrated the interstices of Korea’s kinship system and foregrounded the genealogical subject—a structure of identity defined by kinship obligation and understood as socialization of the emotional self. Lineage novels, which constituted the core of elite vernacular Korean literature and circulated between the late 17th and early 20thcenturies, configure Korean kinship as a series of clashes between genders and generations, which produce unruly, violent emotions.

*** Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea : Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea : Ksenia Chizhova : 9780231187817 (bookdepository.com)

*** Bodies of Texts: Women Calligraphers and the Elite Vernacular Culture in Late Choso˘n Korea (1392–1910) Bodies of Texts: Women Calligraphers and the Elite Vernacular Culture in Late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) | The Journal of Asian Studies | Cambridge Core

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