Documents of a Literary System as a Subject of Empirical Studies

A b s t r a c t

The paper identifies the category of “documents of a literary system” as a basis for empirical literary studies research. It presents literature and documentation studies, bibliographical and information-scientific aspects of identifying, processing and using documents in this discipline. Based on the available literature, basic types of such objects and their functions within a literary system are indicated. The paper indicates that the dispersion of descriptive procedures of such objects plays a key role for the success of empirical research in literature studies, and it proposes treating this problem as a challenge in adapting the research infrastructures to the empirical needs of literature analyses.