This textbook represents an experience in a systematic description of the ways of development of Western literary criticism in the 19th-20th centuries. It views the history of Western criticism as the history of a complex dialogic interaction between four scientific paradigms: poetics, hermeneutics, phenomenology and sociology. Each scientific paradigm is presented in the manual as a set of schools and concepts, based on a fundamentally solid theory of the text and practicing, to one degree or another, a solid methodology for working with artistic phenomena. For undergraduates, graduate students and teachers of philological faculties of universities.