LITERATURE REVIEW: READER-RESPONSE THEORY AND THE MORAL RECEPTION OF BRITISH FANTASTIC AND AMERICAN MORAL REALISM
LITERATURE REVIEW: READER-RESPONSE THEORY AND THE MORAL RECEPTION OF BRITISH FANTASTIC AND AMERICAN MORAL REALISM

Summary/Abstract: This article re-examines the moral reception of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) through a rigorously theorized reader-response framework. Drawing on the seminal interventions of Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish, it advances the argument that moral meaning is neither a stable textual property nor a recoverable authorial intention, but a historically contingent construct actualized in situated acts of reading. Moral interpretation is thus reconceived as a dynamic process of negotiation, mediated by interpretive communities, pedagogical formations, and culturally embedded horizons of expectation.Although both texts have generated an extensive body of scholarship, critical inquiry has predominantly privileged textual, ideological, or historicist approaches, leaving comparatively underexplored the question of how contemporary readers—particularly those operating outside the Anglo-American cultural matrix—constitute their ethical significance. By foregrounding Romanian readers as a distinct interpretive community, this study interrogates the differential activation of moral meaning in British fantastic literature and American moral realism. It argues that Carroll’s narrative diffuses moral authority and proliferates interpretive indeterminacy, thereby intensifying readerly agency, whereas Twain’s novel organizes ethical experience around a dramatized crisis of conscience that orients readerly alignment. Through this comparative lens, the article demonstrates that moral reception is not an invariant effect of textual structure but an emergent phenomenon shaped by cultural location and interpretive practice.

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