The author presents the context in which the ethical turn has taken place and provides examples of traditions in criticism which exerted an infl uence on ethial criticism, putting emphasis on Wayne C. Booth’s book The Rhetoric of Fiction. The author quotes the most important concepts which form the basis of ethical criticism as well as its main principles – the link between a literary work and the outlook of its author, the shaping of a bond between a literary work and the reader in the process of reading, the subjective nature of each reading of a literary work and the consequences that follow this fact. Schwarz suggests distinguishing the ethics while reading (analysis of the moral consequences that follow reading a literary work) from the ethics of reading and presents five different phases of an ethical reading of a literary work.