Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he 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. The text anticipates by decades the ideas and concepts of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, and postcolonialism, as well as cognitive approaches to literature that are only now gaining traction.
Employing the cutting-edge approaches of contemporary psychology and sociology, Soseki created a model for studying the conscious experience of reading literature as well as a theory for how the process changes over time and across cultures. Along with Theory of Literature, this volume reproduces a later series of lectures and essays in which Soseki continued to develop his theories. 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.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Natsume Soseki and the Ten-Year Project
Part One: Excerpts from Theory of Literature
Preface
Book 1: Classification of Literary Substance
Book 2: Quantitative Change in Literary Substance
Book 3: The Particular Character of Literary Substance
Book 4: Interrelations Between Literary Substances
Book 5: Group F
Part Two: Other Writings on Literary Theory, 1907-14
‘Statement on Joining the Asahi’
‘Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts’
‘Preface’ to Literary Criticism
‘The Merits and Flaws of -isms’
‘My Individualism’
Notes
Index
About the author
Atsuko Ueda is associate professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of ‘Literature’ in Meiji Japan (stanford, 2007) and the co-editor of Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings (Columbia University Press, 2010).
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