Our aim is to study the development of the conceptual apparatus of literary theory, and its practical application in criticism. We are not going to deal with different, alternative approaches to the literary work as if all were equivalent, or to map the territory of literary theory in its present state. We are not going to deal with the development of literature, either. Sometimes the literature of an era and its literary theory are widely apart: for instance, there were no successful epics written during the eighteenth century, and the novel was the most popular genre. But the literary theory of the time completely ignores the novel and places the epic foremost in its evaluative schemes. The best theoretical formulations of the conceit of seventeenth-century poetry are found in the eighteenth century. We will point out some aspects of the distance between theory and praxis, but in the main we will take for granted a knowledge of the history of literature, and will concentrate on the conceptual development of the discipline of literary theory. For instance, in studying classical literary theory we will not be concerned with the different role of, say, prophecies in Homer and Virgil. From our present vantage point we may see a different role fulfilled by prophecies in the epics of each author, but this was not a difference which was paid attention to by Roman literary theory--it is a development of our own theory of literature, not Virgil's. We are concerned only with actual theoretical pronouncements on the subject of literature, and not with any literary manifestation which may be linked to them. This may seem too abstract, but literary theory is an abstractive discipline: it tries to discover certain patterns in literature and in literary history by means of an abstractive process. And in doing so, it creates its own pattern of historical development. Our ideas about literary history are not the same as those of the Romantics.