Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings

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 we