I want to know the origin, development, nature and function of Western literary criticism. Can anyone help me out?????

This is a relly broad question. Literary criticism is as
old as literature itself. In the past, literary criticism was primarily conceived as the
study of great literature. Criticism was therefore mostly about passing value judgements
in literature and about creating a canon of texts that were the best and the greatest.
This conception of criticism has been challenged by the so-called "sociological turn" in
literary studies that took place in the 1960s with the introduction of cultural studies.
Critics increasingly pointed out that the works included in the canon reflected the
predominant ideological views of a given era. The greatness of a literary work and of
the canon in general could not be established objectively, but was socially constructed.
Since the introduction of Cultural Studies, western criticism has been less oriented
toward value and more toward analysing the connections between literary texts and
society. In particular, the categories of race, gender and class have constituted a
paradigm to analyse both contemporary and past literature.