Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905–1945 By Su Yun Kim. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020. xi, 204 pp. ISBN: 9781501751882 (cloth)

Chapter 1 examines the discourse of “home” and “love” at the turn of the century by reading government documents and Japanese-language media, followed by an analysis of two fiction works penned by Yi Injik and Yi Kwangsu. [...]Kim shows how questions of ethno-national identity and social class became the main problems that people dealt with through her investigation of Yŏm Sangsŏp's fiction, Mansejŏn. Chapter 3, 4, and 5 are the book's highlights, with extensive discussion of literary and media representations of intermarriage, mixed families, adoption narratives, and international marriage during the wartime period. Imperial Romance opens up a new possibility in reading Koreans’ relationship with the Japanese Empire through the theme of intermarriage with a wide range of sources and careful readings of both literary works and archives.