If you’ve ever taken a basic academic course on Scripture, you’ve probably heard of the “documentary hypothesis” that identifies four different “authors” (or groups of authors) for the Torah. It arises from the application of literary-philological analysis techniques to the ancient text.
At Sheffield University, some author proposes his own Documentary Hypothesis on another well-known body of literature in a paper called New Directions in Pooh Studies:
the dogma of unitary authorship for works of literature must be totally abandoned. In all confidence we may say that a priori we may expect the Pooh corpus (viz. Winnie-the-Pooh, hereafter abbreviated W, containing traditions of higher antiquity than the Deutero-Pooh book, The House at Pooh Corner, hereafter abbreviated H) to be of composite origin; even if there were such a person as A.A. Milne, traditionally the ‘author’, we may be sure that he did not write the Pooh books….