Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings

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Although Natsume Soseki is widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, he began his writing career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. He would later look back on his Theory of Literature (1907) as an immature and unfinished work, but it is in fact an astonishingly original attempt at constructing a model for understanding all literature through the experience of reading. Soseki insists that literary taste is socially and historically determined, a position that allows him to challenge the superiority of the Western canon. Moreover, even as Soseki defines the literary by distinguishing it from the scientific, his theory is grounded in scientific knowledge, thereby claiming a universal validity. The Theory of Literature foreshadows the ideas and concepts that would later form the critical foundations of formalism, structuralism, reader-response theory, cognitive science, and postcolonialism. It remains an unprecedented work of literary theory, unmistakably modern yet also clearly (and self-consciously) non-Western. In a laterseries of lectures and essays, Soseki continued to develop his ideas. This material, some of it never before translated into English, is also included in the volume. The editors offer a critical introduction that contextualizes S?seki's theoretical project historically and explores its contemporary legacy.