Tips for reading the references: 

1. Theories of literature offer us with different approaches and perspectives to understand a text, which would show us a very different world of leaning and help us to improve the abstract logical thinking, although each branch of a theory is very complicated and systematically profound.

2. Just look through the chapters in books and pick up the theories that impress or attract you most, try to get to know them! 

3. Meanwhile when you finish reading a particular chapter, it does not mean you could grasp that theory well, since reading one or two chapters of introduction of a theory is far not enough, therefore if you really feel interested in one of the theories, you’d better read more specialized books to understand them more thoroughly, and you must do so especially when you decide to write a undergraduate thesis about literary criticism in the future.