Theory of Literature


![In describing the treatment of manuscripts, Wellek and Warren often cite research into the works of William Shakespeare.[36]](/uploads/202502/16/Shakespeare4530.jpg)

Theory of Literature is a book on literary scholarship by René Wellek, of the structuralist Prague school, and Austin Warren, a self-described "old New Critic". The two met at the University of Iowa in the late 1930s, and by 1940 had begun writing the book; they wrote collaboratively, in a single voice over a period of three years. Its contents were based on their shared understandings of literature.