Reader-response criticism developed in opposition to the New Criticism, the predominant movement in literary criticism in America and Britain from roughly the 1930s to the 1950s. According to the New Critics, literature does not exist to promulgate ideas, good or bad; nor does it exist to to promote or denigrate authority or orthodoxy. New Critics believed that our concern must of necessity be primarily with the literary work --- not with an attempt to make sense of the author's biography or psychology or with historical context. They also believed that an individual reader's appreciation of a poem did not matter. W.K. Wimsatt, a famous New Critic, coined the phrase "affective fallacy" to explain what he considered the erroneous notion that the impressions a literary work make upon a reader are worthy of consideration.
While many scholars consider Stanley Fish's 1967 publication of "Surprised by Sin," a study of how readers respond to John Milton's "Paradise Lost," the firing shot of the reader-response revolution, some earlier authors anticipated Fish's concern for the role of the reader in the study of literature. One important example is "An Experiment in Criticism," a 1961 book by C.S. Lewis, who was also famous for his "Narnia" novels, his Christian apologetics and his influential studies of medieval British literature. Lewis investigates methods of reading and discusses the difference between what he calls "literary" and "non-literary" readers. He maintains that traditional conceptions of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" reading are non-productive and suggests that a book is "quality" if most people who read it once will read it again.
In 1967, Stanley Fish published "Surprised by Sin." In an essay published as a part of his collection "There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too," Fish reveals that he wrote the book after teaching a Milton course at the University of California, Berkeley -- without ever having taken a Milton course as either a graduate or undergraduate student. In "Surprised by Sin," Fish furthers a claim rarely made about "Paradise Lost": that it actually accomplishes Milton's stated goal of "justify[ing] the ways of God to men." Fish noticed while reading that the parts of Milton's poem usually considered boring, such as Book III, only seem so because characters like Milton's God and the Son make use of logic rather than rhetoric, unlike the more readily interesting Satan.
In 1968, Norman Holland published "The Dynamics of Literary Response," a psychoanalytic study of how readers project their "fantasies" onto texts and then use various defense mechanisms to justify their aberrant readings. While Holland's work, like that of Fish, focuses on the responses of real readers, the work of German critic Wolfgang Iser addresses instead the concept of an "ideal" reader. Iser's book "Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology" examines how literary texts operate on the brain of the ideal reader.