Literary Reception

Literary reception is the perception, assimilation, and interpretation of a literary work or phenomenon by readers, criticism, and other artists in different historical epochs. Reception embraces both the individual reader's perception and the collective 'reading' of an era, as well as one writer's creative assimilation of another's legacy (the reception of tradition). A key tenet of reception theory is the historical variability of perception: each epoch 'rereads' the classics anew, discovering relevant meanings in them; thus a work's 'life' continues in an endless chain of its readings. Reception received its theoretical grounding in the reception aesthetics of the Constance school (Hans Robert Jauss, the concept of the 'horizon of expectations'). The study of reception is an important field of comparative literature and literary history: one studies, for example, the reception of Shakespeare or Goethe in Ukraine, the worldwide reception of Taras Shevchenko, and the reception of antiquity by Ukrainian literature. Reception is closely linked to interpretation, translation, and intertextuality.