How It All Got Started
Officially, Reader-Response theory got going in the late 1960s, when a group of critics including Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Norman N. Holland started asking questions about how a reader's response to a literary text actually creates that literary text.
But the real roots of Reader-Response theory can be traced further back to 1938. That's the year that Literature as Exploration, a book by scholar Louise Rosenblatt, was published. In this book, Rosenblatt deals at length with how the reader's response to a text is fundamental to the understanding of a literary work. These ideas didn't catch on until the 1960s, but when they did, they became the theory we know and maybe love today.