Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings

Natsume Soseki, Edited by Michael Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy

Paper, 304 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14657-9
$27.50 / £19.00

January, 2009
Cloth, 304 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14656-2
$50.00 / £34.50

Natsume Soseki, widely held to be Japan's greatest modern novelist, in fact began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably forward-thinking attempt to understand how and why we read. Soseki would later critique Theory of Literature as an unfinished work, but the text remains an unprecedented achievement, anticipating by decades the ideas and concepts that would form the critical foundations of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, cognitive science, and postcolonialism.

Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading, as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. By insisting that literary taste is socially and historically determined, Soseki was able to challenge the superiority of the Western canon, and by grounding his theory in scientific knowledge, he was able to claim a universal validity.

Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories—some of which have never before been translated into English. In addition, the editors of the book provide a critical introduction contextualizing Soseki's theoretical project in history and exploring its contemporary legacy.

Related Subjects

• Asian Literature
• Literary Criticism and Theory

Series

• Weatherhead Books on Asia

About the Author

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the Meiji Era, known for his books Kokoro, Botchan, and I Am a Cat.

Michael K. Bourdaghs is associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism and the translation editor of Kamei Hideo's Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature.

Atsuko Ueda is assistant professor of East Asian studies at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment.

Joseph A. Murphy is associate professor of languages, literatures, and cultures at the University of Florida and author of The Metaphorical Circuit: Negotiating the Gap Between Literature and Science in Twentieth-Century Japan. His recent work concerns the cognitive basis of narrative comprehension and includes an article in the volume Cognition and Literature, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

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