Educators can help students develop enthusiastic, committed readers who are mentally sharp by developing approaches to literature teaching that are based upon informed concepts of reading and response rather than upon conventional inherited ideas of comprehension and criticism. A study of how 15-year-old students responded to a poem indicated that…

Since the 1950s, literary study has experienced a major paradigm shift. M. H. Abrams' notion that the author, reader, and the signified world are arranged like satellites around a stable text has been succeeded by one that acknowledges the reader to be a central determinant in any "reading" of a text. Five themes related to reader…

The phenomenon of a "secondary world"--the world of imagination created by writers of fiction in which writers and readers mentally participate--is described. Theories on the subject are discussed, and a three-dimensional model of the psychological structure of this world is presented. (PP)

Discusses the theoretical considerations of readers' response to literature. Explores procedures for monitoring and evaluating children's responses to literature. (HTH)

The institutional view of literature in the National Curriculum of Great Britain shows a dramatic belittlement in its revised version. It lacks a coherent literary or pedagogical rationale and substitutes a functional one in which over-simplification purports to be clarification. The institution is primarily concerned to define English literary…