earticle

영어

Women reading popular fiction and drama in late imperial China and Chosŏn Korea, from the
late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century on, emerged with the growth of commercialization and urbanization and the spread of print culture. These literary women were not only virtuous Confucian women who played a key role in popularizing, internalizing, and diffusing
Confucian ideology in everyday practice, but also obsessive novel readers who kept reading the
vulgar genre of novel in their bed chambers in spite of male elite's anxiety about female novel
reading. Emerging female novel readership and reading practices in the inner chambers, despite
incessant male concerns for and authoritative attempts with the regulation of female reading, played a significant role in the formation of women's communities.
In this study, therefore, my main focus consists in the interplay between female audiences and
women's culture in traditional Confucian society. Literate women's reading cultures in late imperial
China and Chosŏn Korea show some distinctions, while Confucian culture have the great impact
on both. Firstly, the former shows far closer interrelations with print culture than the latter;
Secondly, female practices of reading and writing in the latter, through the medium of hangŭl,
were established as part of women's culture without any strong sense of resistance. It is not
improbable that female reading practices, including a variety of activities such as group reading,
reading aloud, handcopying, collecting, circulating, collating, and rewriting books, played an
essential part in the formation of women's self-consciousness and their own culture.