  By far Ingarden’s best-known and most influential work, especially in the English-speaking world, is The Literary Work of Art, which was written around 1926, and first published in German in 1931. It is fundamentally a work in ontology, in Ingarden’s sense (see §2 above), laying out the essential features anything must have to be counted as a literary work, what parts it must have and how they are interrelated, and how such entities as literary works relate to other sorts of entities such as authors, copies of texts, readers, and ideal meanings.