Reader-response criticism | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 24 pages of analysis & critique of Reader-response criticism.

Reader-response criticism | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 24 pages of analysis & critique of Reader-response criticism.
This section contains 6,707 words
(approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Randall Craig

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...

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This section contains 6,707 words
(approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Randall Craig
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