ABSTRACT

Rene Wellek (b. 1903) was born in Vienna, and emigrated to the United States after taking his Ph.D. at the University of Prague. He has taught at the universities of Princeton, Prague, London, and Iowa, and is now Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. Professor Wellek's many publications include: The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1941), Theory of Literature, with Austin Warren (New York, 1949), A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, 2 vols, (New Haven, 1955), and Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, 1963), a collection of occasional essays from which 'Literary Theory, Criticism and History', first published in the Sewanee Review in 1960, is reprinted here.