Yeoseong yeongung soseol (女性英雄 小說 Female Hero Fiction) is a Korean literary genre that consists of works structured around chronicling the lives of female heroines. In general, these works depict a female protagonist disguising herself as a man and then proceeding to fight in battles or demonstrate other forms of heroic behavior.
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Concept of female hero fiction
Female hero fiction is a genre of literary fiction that features a heroic female character as its main protagonist and follows her life story. Typically, works of female hero fiction follow the archetypal structure of “a hero’s life” in which a character, often descended from a noble family and born under unusual circumstances, is orphaned or suffers after running away from home, and finally emerges victorious only after undergoing numerous struggles. The fact that a woman plays the role of the hero can be understood as a modification in form of the traditional hero fiction, emerging as a later variation in a natural process of change and adaptation of the traditional hero fiction. In the early years, the hero fiction was thought of as a “low-ranking” or “low-class” literary genre, but as research into individual works has proliferated, the female hero fiction has come to be understood as a unique and independent category of fiction.
Female hero fiction as category
Representative works of female hero fiction are Seol Sojeo jeon (薛小姐傳 The Tale of Seol Sojeo), Bak ssi buin jeon (朴氏夫人傳 The Tale of Madame Park), Okju hoyeon (玉珠好緣 The Good Union of the Jade and the Pearl), Hong Gyewol jeon (洪桂月傳 The Tale of Hong Gyewol), Kim Huigyeong jeon (金喜慶傳 The Tale of Kim Huigyeong), Bang Hanrim jeon (方翰林傳 The Tale of Bang Hanrim), and Jeong Sujeong jeon (鄭秀貞傳 The Tale of Jeong Sujeong). In general, these works are characterized by a female protagonist disguising herself as a man and descriptions of war, but the female protagonist in Bak ssi buin jeon does not disguise herself as a man, and Seol Sojeo jeon does not feature any war stories. Thus, though all these works fall under the category of “female hero fiction,” there are small differences between them.
When considering these points, female hero fiction can be largely divided into two categories. The first subcategory of female hero fiction includes all the elements of disguising as a man and war stories. That is, this subcategory includes works that depict the course of the female protagonist's heroic life, during which the female protagonist disguises herself as a man and fights in the battlefield during wartime to demonstrate her heroic capabilities. Other examples include Hong Gyewol jeon, where the female protagonist disguises herself a man and then takes the civil service examination, appearing afterwards in the battlefield to save the land in a time of crisis and then is successful in the public sphere, as well as Bang Hanrim jeon, in which the female protagonist disguises herself as a man and lives as a man for the rest of her life, taking the civil service examination, battling in war, and demonstrating her heroic abilities.
The second subcategory of female hero fiction comprises stories in which a female protagonist appears and demonstrates her abilities through activities in the public domain. Though the structure of these stories does not entirely adhere to the template of chronicling a hero's life, this subcategory includes stories where the female protagonist's heroic behavior is depicted. Examples include Seol Sojeo jeon, where the female protagonist does not participate directly in battle, but nevertheless disguises herself as a man and takes the civil service examination to become a respected civil minister (munsin), as well as Bak ssi buin jeon, where the female protagonist does not disguise herself as a man and does not leave the domestic sphere, but nevertheless demonstrates her heroic capacities and saves the land from a crisis.