SHANGHAI, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- Two Chinese professors of English literature, also father and son, have completed the translation of U.S. comparative literary critic Rene Wellek's landmark volume Theory of Literature in 28 years.

    The eight-volume Chinese version of the Theory of Literature, one of the first works that systematized literary theory, was put on shelf by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House Wednesday. It has a total of 3.5 million Chinese characters in the books.

    Yang Qishen, an English and American literature professor of the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, began to translate the masterpiece in 1981 when he was 72. His son Yang Ziwu, 54, began to translate the book several years later after his father got sick.

    Yang Qishen died in 1996 and his son carried on with the translation.

    Since the 1960s, the Chinese higher education authority had planned to translate Rene Wellek's works into Chinese but the project was delayed due to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

    The publication of the Theory of Literature's Chinese version is of great significance to the research of China's comparative literature and art theories, said Lu Gusun, a famous scholar and translator at Fudan University.

    Rene Wellek, born in 1903 and died in 1995, was a Czech-American comparative literary critic and is remembered as an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition.