The main aim of the master's thesis is to examine the role of contemporary literary criticism in fostering literary text reading. The first part of the thesis establishes the theory of literary criticism, its development, and modifications in modern times, which are primarily divided into print and online criticism. Additionally, the concepts of literary reading, the literary reader, and other forms of reading are developed. The second part of the thesis focuses on the analysis of one hundred contemporary literary criticisms, half of which are from print sources and half from online sources. The analysis shows that the encouragement of reading through literary criticism is not sufficiently distinct to be considered a function but rather a (coincidental) consequence of quality criticism. A key finding of the thesis is that print criticism offers a higher quality of analysis than online criticism, as it deals with a wider range of genres, evaluates them more diversely, consistently compares reviewed works to other relevant texts, and provides more arguments than online criticism.
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