[While] René Wellek called for intense critical exploration of the text, he never abandoned the historical method embodied in his Kant in England and The Rise of English Literary History. His synthesis of theory, criticism, and history reflects a passionate dedication to literary studies as a humane discipline, its standards derived not from "personal" taste or "impersonal science," but from the norms of history. For Wellek, the literary work is no simple verbal construct and no mere reflection of society: it is a phenomenological aesthetic object. Thus criticism means concern for values and qualities. Understanding—adequate analysis, interpretation, and evaluation—requires theory. Adequate theory requires a history of criticism. And adequate history requires an international perspective.

Envisioning the distant ideal of universal literary history and scholarship, Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism richly contributes to what Aldo Scaglione calls "an ecumenical republic of letters."… [Wellek's] historical imagination...