Description: Michael K. Bourdaghs presents a radical reframing of the works of Natsume Sōseki--widely considered to be Japan's greatest modern novelist--as critical and creative responses to the emergence of new forms of property ownership in nineteenth-century Japan.
Review Quotes: "Michael K. Bourdaghs's A Fictional Commons provides a strikingly new approach to thinking about the fiction and theories of Natsume Sōseki as well as for thinking how literature as a practice gestures to something beyond the modern regime of private property. Literature, Bourdaghs demonstrates, is one of the sites where we imagine the return in a higher dimension of the commons, the gift, and primitive communism."--Karatani Kojin, author of "Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy"