The book is a top-level textbook intended for undergraduates and graduate students—people who already have basic knowledge of literary theory; The author sets himself the task not of exposing them to indisputable truths, but of showing the complexity of the science of literature and the unresolved nature of many of its problems. The presentation is not dogmatic, but critical: the main problems of literary theory are consistently reviewed and various approaches to them developed by the science of the 20th century are demonstrated; These approaches are analytically compared with each other, but the reader is asked to draw conclusions about the applicability of each of them. The achievements of the science of literature are systematically combined with the concepts of other related disciplines: philosophy, sociology, semiotics, linguistics. The experience of different national schools in literary theory is used: Russian formalism, American “new criticism”, German receptive aesthetics, French and Soviet structuralism and others. The theoretical presentation is illustrated by analysis of literary texts.