Reader Response is a primarily German and American literary theory that arose in response to the textual emphasis of New Criticism of the 1940's through 1960's in the west. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text. No appeal to the authorial intention, authorial biography, nor reader's psychology was allowed in the exegesis of literary works for the most orthodox New Critics.

Reader Response is a group of approaches to understanding literature that have in common an emphasis on the reader's role in the creation of a literary work's meaning. The term encompasses theorists who share very little besides an attention to the reader. Since the theorists who make up "Reader Response" were not consciously creating a school of thought, it is very difficult to say when and with whom the movement began. Also, since Reader Response is a reaction and corrective to the excesses of the most dogmatic New Critics, it did not emerge as a total system.

In general, one can break down "reader response" into those who focus upon the reader's experience and psychology, those who concentrate on the linguistic/rhetorical dynamic of audience, and those who concentrate on readers as cultural and historical ciphers.

Among the most important writers who can be called Reader Response are Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco, Hans-Robert Jauss , Stanley Fish, Eve Sedgewick, and Jane Tompkins . Some take the position that there is no objective literary text at all, that the entire meaning of a literary work is in the reader's mind, and therefore the reader's personal biography, physical status, and psychology are the center of a literary text. Others argue that meaning is a human event, rather than an objective fact, and therefore all of the meaning of a literary work is a social event (and not so solipsistically private) where the text creates a society and a common culture. Others argue that the psychological effects of a literary event reveal the fringes of a culture's ideology, and therefore the reactions to literary works can be a tool for historical analysis. This last, sometimes called "reception aesthetics" rather than "reader response," is the approach taken by some of the followers of Hans-Georg Gadamer (notably Jauss).