ABSTRACT

The main advocates of reader-response criticism acknowledge the complementary importance of text and reader. The development of reader-response writings since the 1960s has steadily forged a new relationship between the act of reading and the act of teaching literature which has significant consequences for the way the relationship between young readers and their books is conceptualised. Oral, written, or graphic responses and whether the readers are recording individually or in groups all provide further dimensions to the means of monitoring and collecting response data. Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory underpins the approach which gives the hard evidence for the reader’s ‘evocation’ of a poem through meticulous, descriptive analyses of aesthetic reading. Children’s concepts and social attitudes have been the subject of reader-response enquiries in three complementary ways: multicultural and feminist studies; whole-culture studies; and cross-cultural studies, which compare the responses of young readers from different countries to the same texts to identify similarities and cultural differences.