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Reader Classical theory, seeing literature as an affective medium, necessarily assumed a reader to be affected, but did not emphasize the reader as such. Horace, in his Art of Poetry, says that the poet’s aim is either to profit or to please – but readers are dismissed with the casual comment that elders prefer profit and youngsters pleasure. To cite ‘the poet’s aim’ as Horace does is to shift from affect to intention, a typical move in authorcentred criticism. Neoclassical discussions of taste suggest attention to what in the twentieth century was called the reader’s competence. Eighteenth-century fictional practice goes further, enacting the dynamics of reading: an inscribed reader for Fielding or Sterne is functionally engaged in a temporal process of challenge and response. Nineteenth-century novelists often imply a social dimension for readers, including them by address in some actual or imagined community; but twentieth-century didactic criticism usually glossed this by a return to authorial intention. As usual, it is Henry James who offers crucial insights into the question of author versus reader. An early formulation suggests that the balance of power is on the author’s side: ‘the writer makes the reader, very much as he makes his characters’. But James described his own reading practice in terms of ‘reconstruction’, and his emphasis is increasingly on the reader as an active figure rather than a mere affective target for experience or instruction.