Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism collects for the first time the most important theoretical statements on readers and the reading process. Its essays trace the development of reader-response criticism from its beginnings in New Criticism (Walker Gibson) through its appearance in structuralism (Gerald Prince, Jonathan Culler), stylistics (Michael Riffaterre), phenomenology (Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish), psychoanalytic criticism (Norman N. Holland, David Bleich), and post-structuralist theory (Fish, Walter Benn Michaels). The editor shows how each of these essays treats the problern of determinate meaning and compares their unspoken moral assumptions. In a concluding essay, she redefines the reader-response movement by placing it in historical perspective, providing the first short history of the concept of literary response.
A complete, up-to-date, annotated bibliography of reader-oriented work, both theoretical and applied, makes this anthology an excellent guide to reader-response criticism. It is a valuable text for courses in literary criticism and theory as weil as a superior reference work for scholars and students of literature, critical theory, and the philosophy of art.
