Originally published: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.

In a rare fusion of literary sensibility with psychological research, Norman N. Holland brings to light important data showing how personality—in the fullest sense of character development and identity—affects the way in which we read and interpret literature. This book will show that readers respond to literature in terms of their own lifestyle, character, personality, or identity. By such terms, psychoanalytic writers mean an individual's characteristic way of dealing with the demands of outer and inner reality. Each new experience develops the style, while the pre-existing style shapes each new experience. The sub-title of this book, Five Readers Reading, reflects the fact that the author, a distinguished literary critic, worked with five student readers, using a battery of psychological tests and extensive interviews to study the ways they reacted to classic short stories by Faulkner, Hemingway, and others. Combining his own interpretation of the stories with his understanding of the readers and their reactions, Holland derives four principles that inform literary response. He then goes on to show how these principles apply, not just to literary response, but to the way personality shapes any experience. The book carries Holland's previous studies of creation and responsive recreation forward to a major theoretical statement. He rejects the artificial idea that one must think of a text (or other event) as separate from its perceivers, illustrating the dynamics by which perceiver and perceived mutually create an experience. For critics and students of the psychology of human behavior, this is challenging and seminal reading.

Nineteenth-century America witnesses an unprecedented rise in reading activity as a result of increasing literacy, advances in printing and book production, and improvements in transporting printed material. As the act of reading took on new cultural and intellectual significance, American writers had to adjust to changes in their relationship with a growing audience. Calling for a new emphasis on historical analysis, Readers in History reconsiders reader-response and reception approaches to the shifting contexts of reading in nineteenth-century America. James L. Machor and his contirbutors dispute the "essentializing tendency" of much reader-response criticism to date, arguing that reading and the textual construction of audience can best be understood in light of historically specific interpretive practices, ideological frames, and social conditions. Employing a variety of perspectives and methods—including feminism, deconstruction, and cultural criticsim—the essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of historical inquiry for exploring the dynamics of audience engagement.

"Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism" collects the most important theoretical statements on readers and the reading process. Its essays trace the development of reader-response criticism from its beginnings in New Criticism through its appearance in structuralism, stylistics, phenomenology, psychoanalytic criticism, and post-structuralist theory. The editor shows how each of these essays treats the problem of determinate meaning and compares their unspoken moral assumptions. In a concluding essay, she redefines the reader-response movement by placing it in historical perspective, providing the first short history of the concept of literary response. This anthology remains an indispensable guide to reader-response criticism. -- From publisher's description.