Reception study is an important tool for understanding how readers encounter texts and absorb information. This up-to-date selection of the most important published work lays out the principles of reception study and its major theoreticians, and goes on to show how the method is being widely used in areas as varied as cultural studies, African-American studies, and the burgeoning field called the history of the book. This volume presents the only complete account of reception study today.

Theoretical Accounts of Reception -- "The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding" / Hans Robert Jauss -- "Yet Once More" / Stanley Fish -- "Interpretation and Rhetorical Hermeneutics" / Steven Mailloux -- "Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts" / Tony Bennett -- Literary Critical Studies of Reception -- "1790" / Gary Taylor -- "Literary Theory and the Black Tradition" / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- "The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies / Claudia L. Johnson -- "Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne's Literary Reputation" / Jane Tompkins -- Reception Study and the History of the Book -- "First Steps Toward a History of Reading" / Robert Darnton -- "Reading the Novel" / James Smith Allen -- Reception Study, Cultural Studies, and Mass Communication -- "Readers and Their Romances" / Janice Radway -- "Madonna" / John Fiske -- "Women Like Us: Working-Class Women Respond to Television Representations of Abortion" / Andrea Press, Elizabeth Cole -- "Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of The Silence of the Lambs" / Janet Staiger -- "Economies of Value" / John Frow -- Limitations and Difficulties of Reception Study -- "Reading and History" / Paul de Man -- "The Discourse of Value" / John Guillory -- "Confrontations with Radicalness" / Robert Holub -- Bibliography: Reception Studies -- General Theories -- Texts and Authors -- History of the Book -- Texts, Genres, and Audiences in Mass and Popular Culture.