Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Reader-Response Criticism - Randall Craig (essay date spring 1984)

Randall Craig (essay date spring 1984)

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...

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