SOURCE: Craig, Randall. “Reader-Response Criticism and Literary Realism.” Essays in Literature 11, no. 1 (spring 1984): 113-26.

In the following essay, Craig discusses the effectiveness of using reader-response theory in the study of nineteenth-century realistic fiction.

Wolfgang Iser's study of the reader in the English novel and Robert Alter's survey of self-conscious fiction follow curiously similar paths, intersecting at Fielding, Sterne, and Thackeray, by-passing the major literary realists of the nineteenth century, and arriving safely in the compatible country of Joyce and Beckett.¹ The similar itineraries suggest an affinity between the critical perspective of reader-response theory and literary modes typified by self-reflexive or metafictional techniques. Beyond that, however, the avoidance of the realistic novel raises the question of how successfully the methods of reader-response criticism can be applied to nineteenth-century realistic fiction, or more generally, to fictional modes in which self-reflexive textual strategies and the concomitant self-conscious reading activity are deemphasized...