ABSTRACT
The most informative theoretical definition of the literary object is probably the central chapter in Theory of Literature by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren. The chapter is called ‘The Analysis of the Literary Work of Art’ in the first edition and, more pretentiously but more accurately, ‘The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art’ in the second edition. Literature's case is not quite the same. Since hundreds of thousands of copies must exist, say, of Hamlet, the condition of its survival is not so obviously a physical matter – the paper, print or ink of extant editions or manuscripts – but of the existence of readers capable of reading and responding to Elizabethan English and the Elizabethan drama. An English student will probably find it more useful to turn to Coleridge, fragmentary though his theory of literature was, and to use Wellek and Warren as an encyclopedia rather than as a guide-book.
