Abstract: Literary criticism was an important part of Western literary theory in the 20th century and has not lost its importance to this day. Criticism has an active influence on the literary process, as well as directly on the formation of public consciousness. This article discusses two important approaches, the principle of literary criticism. The archetypal literary criticism and the theory of intertextuality. Archetypal literary criticism is a theory that interprets a text by focusing on mythological motifs and archetypes in narrative, symbols, imagery, and character types that recur in different literary works. Analysis of the inclusions of intertext in the text of a work of art gives reason to consider them as one of the most important devices in the writer's stylistic system. The ability to integrate elements of another text into one's own work and introduce one's own text into the public consciousness is called "intertextualization" within the framework of this theory. Intertextuality is a common property of texts, expressed in the presence of links between them, due to which texts (or parts of them) can explicitly or implicitly refer to each other in a variety of ways. It is worth noting that the archetypal literary criticism and the theory of intertextuality have deep internal theoretical connections, which boil down to three main points: these are literary repetitions, general views on literature, and the consideration of literature as a repository of memory. Although these theories arose in the era of different cultural and historical paradigms - structuralism and post-structuralism, they have much in common in terms of connotation. Being different theoretical systems of literary criticism, archetypal criticism and intertextuality are closely connected by the presence of an element of psychological criticality in both. This article searches for similarities between the two indicated systems in these three aspects and substantiates their theoretical connection, which proves the complementary nature of these two theories.