Theory of Literature Book

Classic mid-century literary theory. This book fell out of fashion with the rise of structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and '70s, but it actually has quite a lot to teach us still. Wellek and Warren are very fair to a variety of approaches, stressing the importance of not only close reading, but of textual criticism, the development of convention, and the recognition of fluid boundaries between "literature" and other varieties of writing. Amazingly, in the '40s, they noted the disunity of "national" and "single-language" literary traditions, looking instead at both regionalisms and boundary-crossings.

A few negative points: despite their careful discussion of the definition of "literature," in practice they draw almost all of their examples from the canon. Definitions of a few key terms are taken for granted (like "norm" when they define a poem as "a structure of norms"). Also, European literature is taken as universal - a common tendency in Western theory, which persists to the present.

Nevertheless, Theory of Literature is an incredibly helpful and clearly-written introduction to the study of literature, and one that deserves a re-evaluation today, in the aftermath of deconstruction.