A Fictional Commons
eBook - PDF

A Fictional Commons

Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Fictional Commons

Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature

About this book

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume S?seki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For S?seki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts S?seki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentar?, author of Japan's first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani K?jin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, S?seki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.

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Yes, you can access A Fictional Commons by Michael K. Bourdaghs in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Asian Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Note on Usage
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Introduction / Owning Up to Sōseki
  6. Chapter One / Fables of Property: Nameless Cats, Trickster Badgers, Stray Sheep
  7. Chapter Two / House under a Shadow: Disowning the Psychology of Possessive Individualism in The Gate
  8. Chapter Three / Property and Sociological Knowledge: Sōseki and the Gift of Narrative
  9. Chapter Four / The Tragedy of the Market: Younger Brothers, Women, and Colonial Subjects in Kokoro
  10. Conclusion / Who Owns Sōseki? Or, How Not to Belong in World Literature
  11. Notes
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index