Russian formalism
"Theory of Literature" was influenced by Russian formalism, a school of thought which sought to examine literature (or, more precisely, what formalist-turned-structuralist Roman Jakobson termed "literariness") as an autonomous body, and the American New Criticism, which likewise denied external influences. The book borrowed formalism's concepts of an aesthetic function and dominance of different elements of language. Unlike Russian formalism, however, Wellek and Warren's theory recognized the possibility of factors outside the work being studied, although Wellek and Warren continued to emphasize aspects within the work itself. Also unlike their forerunners, Wellek and Warren saw aesthetic value as not the defamiliarization of the mundane, but an interaction among the strata derived from Roman Ingarden's work: the phonological (sound) level at the base, then semantic (meaning), and the "world" created by literature. This last strata they divided into paradigms and "metaphysical qualities", the level which a reader contemplates. They did not, however, accept Ingarden's teachings as a whole, writing that Ingarden "analyze[d] the work of art without reference to values", a system which they found untenable.