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“... variety lead one to ponder what it is all about and where it may be heading. The book by René Wellek, focused on Central and Eastern European critics, is the penultimate volume of a vast project he began in the Fifties. The two previous volumes dealt respectively with English and American criticism in this same half-century, and chapters of the ...”

“... in 1871 in recognition of his services to literary history and the cause of the Risorgimento. René Wellek, appropriately, in this first volume commissioned by the British Comparative Literature Association, contributes an article on De Sanctis’ understanding of what could be meant by ‘realism’. ‘Comparative literature’, as the term was ...”

“... the post-war period has increasingly been seen as the major theorist of German romanticism and (as René Wellek has argued) of European romanticism. ‘The work of criticism is superfluous,’ wrote Schlegel, ‘unless it is itself a work of art as independent of the work it criticises as that is independent of the materials that went into it.’ To find ...”

“... a case of mere coincidence. It is all a question of faith rather than evidence.In an early review, René Wellek showed that Fisch’s suggestion of Vichian influence on British writers was unfounded, adding the expectation that efforts at substantiation and revision would be forthcoming. Twenty years later ...”

“... widening of lyric’s empire to encompass more or less the entire field of poetry led the critic René Wellek to declare that ‘one must abandon attempts to define the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical. Nothing beyond generalities of the tritest kind can result from it.’ He had a point: the word ‘lyric’ was used in such different ways in ...”

“... as having established the independence of literary criticism from philosophy. In March 1937 René Wellek wrote an open letter to Leavis, arising from the publication of Revaluation. He found much to admire in the book, but regretted that its assumptions were not produced and defended: ‘I could wish that you had stated your assumptions more ...”

“... dismiss it because its practitioners were not all explicit about what they were doing or why. René Wellek is no doubt correct in holding that European literary-historical criticism begins in the 18th century, and Lawrence Lipking right that the arts were historically ordered in England at that time. It seems not to have been noticed that Dryden ...”

“... by American Southern critics like Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks, was recently summarised by Rene Wellek: There used to be once a perfectly ordered world, which is, for instance, behind Dante’s poetry. This world disintegrated under the impact of science and scepticism. The ‘dissociation of sensibility’ took place at some time in the 17th century. Man ...”

“... at once.’ She absorbed the theories of the New Critics from Austin Warren, who was at work with René Wellek on A Theory of Literature and teaching at Iowa at the time, and became familiar with the ideas of Southern Agrarians such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, whose wife, Caroline Gordon, would become an astute reader of drafts of O’Connor’s ...”

“... were separated-off from ‘literary criticism’ and interpretation. The split was codified in René Wellek and Austin Warren’s normative handbook. Theory of Literature, published in 1942, where textual studies and editing were defined as ‘Preliminary Operations’ – investigative lines which seemed too materialistic and positive to be included ...”

“... influence in England was negligible or non-existent – on this point I am inclined to agree with René Wellek (cited in evidence against me by Professor Aarsleff) and not with Fisch. The words of Ballanche (which I used as an epigraph to my essay), that Vico’s fate was to ‘rise from the grave when he had no more to teach’ – for the Germans had ...”

“... and bolts. F.R. Leavis was subject to the same delusion when he fiercely denied (in response to René Wellek) that literary critics could or should attempt a ‘philosophical’ account of their arguments and judgments. Leavis took philosophy to be a business of abstract generalisation, wholly out of touch with the experience of actually discovering ...”

“... his many controversies Leavis was always unwilling to give ground and could sometimes be evasive. René Wellek, a Czech-American scholar and a historian of criticism, once politely challenged him to state the theoretical basis of his criticism. Leavis speedily and rather aggressively replied that nothing of the sort was needed, his criteria and his ...”

“... the West as recently as two or three generations ago.’ In the Second World of Eastern Europe, as René Wellek once pointed out, literature was also taken very seriously: seriously enough to be written and read at great personal risk, and to be thought worth suppressing by the authorities. Certainly the universities provided very little time or personnel ...”