A Fictional Commons

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 Sseki (18671916), 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 Sseki, literature was a means for thinking throughand beyondprivate property. Bourdaghs puts Sseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentar, author of Japans first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.