The goals of the present dissertation are twofold: 1) to bring back into the literary thought the notion of "world view", which has been largely discredited due to its abusage in the context of official Marxism during the socialist era, and 2) to affirm the usefulness of the notion of "world view" in the literary practice. The thesis is structured so as to meet the goals: the first chapter presents several probes of the usage of the phrase "world view" and definition discussions related to it. In this framework, the "scientific world view" from the socialist era is then confronted with a range of other definitions of the notion, such as F. X. Šalda's "view of life and world". In the second chapter, I present my approach to this notion, aimed at serving the purposes of current literary research. Firstly, I distinguish the notion of "world view" from the notions of "mentality" and "ideology", and secondly, following the research of The Worldviews Group (Brussels) I propose my own definition of world view. Since the Group does not deal with actual interpretations of literary texts, I make use for the intended purpose of an updated and slightly modified concept of Terry Eagleton, originally published within the monograph Criticism and Ideology (1976). What is essential is foremost to differ between a)...