The Big Names in Reader-Response Theory
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: it all started with Louise Rosenblatt and her book Literature as Exploration. That's the first work of literary criticism that set out in detail a Reader-Response perspective.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a whole crop of critics emerged who focused on analyzing readers' responses to texts. The most important of these critics was a dude called Stanley Fish. He applied a Reader-Response perspective to works like John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and he argued that we just can't understand a literary work like Milton's epic without considering the reader's reaction to it.
A second important theorist is Wolfgang Iser, a German scholar who wrote a lot about how the meaning of a literary text isn't in the text itself but can be found in the interaction between the reader and the text. Iser also had a thing for "blanks," gaps in a text that force the reader to fill in with his or her own imagination.
Norman N. Holland and David Bleich were two guys who were into psychoanalytic theory. They were influenced by the ideas of the psychoanalyst and theorist Sigmund Freud, and they argued that understanding literary texts is all about understanding the psychology of the person who's actually reading the texts.
For instance, if you're a reader who has hang-ups about mommy and daddy—and who doesn't?—then you're probably going to project those issues onto the text you're reading. So when you analyze a text, you not only have to understand the words on the page, you have to understand the mind of the person reading those words.