Lubomír Doležel (3 October 1922, Lesnice – 28 January 2017, Verona) was a Czech literary theorist and one of the founders of the so-called fictional worlds theory.
[1] He was educated at Charles University in Prague and received his CSc (roughly equivalent to a PhD) in Slavic philology from the Institute of the Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Many of his teachers and mentors were representatives of the so-called Prague School, an internationally recognized and influential centre of inter-war structuralist and semiotic thought.
[citation needed] In the 1960s Dolezel worked concurrently as research fellow in the Institute of Czech Language and as assistant, and later associate, professor of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University.
On his return to Prague he was appointed research fellow of the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, but in the fall of 1968 he left the country after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.