The volume From Modern Theory to a Poetics of Experience contains a wide selection of essays, which were published during past decades in academic journal Teksty Drugie and were widely appreciated as significant contributions to the ongoing debate on principles and methods of literary studies. Articles gathered in this collection represent the main schools, tendencies and perspectives applied in contemporary criticism, including the most recent developments and the older traditions, which previously influenced our field. Their chronological succession seems to indicate certain direction of this development, which has moved literary studies from text-oriented, purely scientific procedures to more contextualized, interpretative approaches, labeled here as «poetics of experience».