Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism

Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism collects the most important theoretical statements on readers and the reading process. Its essays trace the development of reader-response criticm 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-structuiralist theory (Fish, Walter Benn Michaels). The editor shows how each of these essays treats the problem 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.

This anthology remains an indispensable guide to reader-response criticm. It is a valuable text for courses in literary criticism and theory as well as a superior refernce work for scholars and students of literature, critical theory, and the philosophy of art.

Jane P. Thompkins has written widely on the work of Charles Borckden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, and Henry James. Her work includes Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work from American Fiction, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, and A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned.