Review - Service Economies: Militarism, Sex work and Migrant Labor in South Korea

In this brilliant and original book, Jin-kyung Lee reads a selection of the most critically acclaimed South Korean novels of the last few decades for traces of Korea's particular journey of capitalist modernisation. Appropriately the book focuses upon labour, specifically military, sexual and migrant labour, to document the connections between the industries where working-class labour was employed and the literary investment in depicting social realism. That labour should turn out to be a key motif in South Korean fiction from the 1960s onwards should come as no surprise given the tumultuous and traumatic experience of industrialisation that engulfed nearly everyone over these decades. Lee's originality is in combining literary analysis and critical theory to re-read these popular classics of the recent past