The"cognitive turn"after the middle of the 20th century has gradually caused many chan-ges in the study of literary reading.In recent years,the continuous progress of digital humanities and experimental cognitive science has more profoundly affected the study of literature.The development of computational text processing technology and human neural simulation technology has provided new methods for the study of literary appreciation worldwide.The text reading or interpretation theory of Western literary criticism has undergone a transformation from focusing on the social and historical background,to the text itself and to large-scale use of corpus reading,etc..A variety of reading modes have appeared,including close reading,distant reading,symptomatic reading,surface reading,digital reading,computational reading,neural reading,scalable reading,post-critical reading,etc.This paper reviews the reading patterns and principles of western literary criticism from a historical perspective,in order to provide some reference materials for the history of literary criticism.