ABSTRACT
This chapter defines the term ‘reception’, taking a new approach which combines reception history, reception theory, and reception studies across multiple disciplines including literary reception studies, audience studies, fan studies, Classical reception, Biblical reception, hermeneutic criticism, and reader-response criticism. Taking seriously the communications metaphor embedded in the term ‘reception’, the chapter argues that a reception-informed literary criticism must take account of the inextricably intertwined relationship between text, reader, and the broader communications systems via which text and reader encounter one another.
The chapter gives a concise overview of the history of critical approaches to readers, reading, and audiences, from Plato and Aristotle to the present day. Locating the origins of contemporary reception studies in the 1960s, it traces the ways in which that period generated new questions about interpretation, meaning, language and power in five key areas of scholarship: book history, bibliography, and media history; feminist, black and postcolonial criticism; Marxist criticism and cultural studies; reader-response criticism; and the structuralist and post-structuralist innovations in semiotics referred to as ‘the linguistic turn’.
