Reader

Generally related to a text‐based literary culture, the termreaderis connected in academic usage to various concepts of literary criticism and theory. In a narrowly defined sense it is used to refer to (1) the empirical reader, the individual historical recipient of a written or printed text. Thus, taken as a group, empirical readers constitute the author's “public” who, as the final link in the chain of literary communication, also influence the production of literature. Accordingly, the historical figure and reading habits of the empirical reader have been the subject of studies ranging from behavioral and cognitive psychology to the sociology and history of reading. Clearly distinct from the empirical reader is (2) the fictional reader, who belongs to the explicitly imagined world of many literary texts and whose profile and reading habits is a major theme of world literature. Literary criticism and theory use the termreader, however, not only to refer to the real or imaginary recipient of a text, but in a broader sense to pinpoint various aspects of writing connected with the addressee. Here the reader is generally a more abstract construct embodying various roles or functions in the process of literary communication; but precise definitions of the concept differ so widely that a consistent typology, let alone a single theory or model covering all usages, is hardly possible. Nevertheless, two concepts can be broadly distinguished: first (3) the fictive reader, understood as the counterpart to the figure of the narrator within the fictional framework, and second (4) the implied reader, a figure of varying profile and indefinable ontological status that functions as the (ideal) conceptual addressee of the text.