1The articles in this issue bear witness to the continuing vitality of reception aesthetics in the humanities and social sciences. Reception is what Mieke Bal has called a “travelling concept” (Bal 2002); following its theorisation in the field of literary studies, it has migrated across disciplines and academic communities to become a complex and layered notion which subsumes different practices and methodologies. Initially centred on the literary text and its readership, the notion of reception was taken up, influentially, by Stuart Hall in his landmark essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973). In the wake of Hall and his work in media studies, reception broadened considerably to take in spectators and auditors, audiences and publics, the phenomena of fandom, mass participation and mass viewership in an age of accelerating global connectivity. Under the impetus of the ‘cultural turn’ in postmodernity (Jameson 1991, 1998), the shift from literary to cultural studies in the 1980s and 90s, the rise of the concept of ‘agency’, issues of reception have been raised and debated across the spectrum of theoretical and cultural practice. With the emergence of visual, material and digital cultures as areas of critical inquiry in their own right, new constituencies, modes and channels of reception have been identified and investigated. Postcolonial and critical race theory, gender studies and queer theory explore challenges to (and complicities with) the prolonged imposition and reception of hegemonic power structures. Forms of creative counter-interpellation – talking or writing back – expose mechanisms of oppression at the point where reception compels the voicing of dissent. These counter-interpellations engage the reader, listener, spectator or player in a species of performance, giving rise to forms of response which are embodied and enacted. The extralinguistic properties of performative response focus critical attention on the corporeal, the sensorial: our response to text, object and moving image can take the form of a visceral entanglement unmediated by language.

2The contributions to this issue testify to the productiveness and plasticity of reception aesthetics as it travels in time, evolving through contact with text, image, object and discipline. Clément Rodier makes a strong case for the pertinence of reception aesthetics to the history of ideas; he returns the reader to the foundational insights of Hans-Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, putting their ideas to work in the field of intellectual history. Claude Lefort’s “oeuvre de pensée” or ‘work of thought’ (Lefort 1986) takes centre stage here. Rodier pinpoints the twin dangers of historical contextualisation and undue focus on social vectors of transmission, which, while valuable in their own right, tend to elide the letter of the work, its hermeneutic dimension. The work of thought, argues Rodier, is to be identified with the sum of its receptions, a position which inevitably raises the spectre of legitimacy – the legitimacy of existing interpretations, and those yet to come. It is here that “interpretive communities” come into their own, ensuring the survival and longevity of the work, sidelining lesser readings and retaining strong ones – a nod to Stanley Fish.

3Fish’s notion of interpretive community brings us to Roger Chartier’s contribution. Referencing Jauss and Barthes as well as Fish, Chartier concedes that notions such as “horizon of expectation,” “interpretive community” and “death of the author” have done useful work in foregrounding the reader and the act of reading as objects of research. However, working within the linguistic paradigm of high theory, these critics neglect the material and social determinants which also function as vectors of textual meaning. The history of the book as object offers a corrective to such approaches, focusing attention on questions of format, layout, typography, paratext, intratextual annotation and edit, all of which inform the text’s reception. Chartier reminds us that a text is always reliant on a material support – the physical object into which it has been copied or printed, the voice that reads or recites it, the myriad forms through which it becomes visible and audible. These are described as so many “publications” which generate their own singular effets de sens in addition to – or regardless of – the text’s semantic content. In Chartier’s analysis, we discern the workings of a ‘material turn’ which fleshes out an economy of reception anchored in the historicity of material forms.

4The ideas of community and materiality are variously explored and amplified by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille, Pierre Labrune, Amélie Macaud, Charlotte Ribeyrol and Inbal Strauss. Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille’s article provides a limpid demonstration of changing horizons of expectation and gauges their effects on editorial practice and subsequent interpretation. The author examines successive readings of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1806), pointing out that Hutchinson’s work, originally composed between 1664 and 1667 but published almost a century and a half later, fell into a historical conjuncture which largely determined the manner of its reception. Readerly expectations in the XIX^th century led to an emphasis on the novelistic elements of the Memoirs, the domestic and sentimental dimensions of Hutchinson’s role as wife and mother, and depicted her as the heroine of the work. This was despite Hutchinson’s stated wish that her work be perceived as a monument to her dead husband, and read first and foremost as a factual, historical record of her times. Tailoring the Memoirs to XIX^th century expectations, their editor, Julius Hutchinson, knowingly erased passages that were overtly Puritan or politically radical in character, insisting on the novelistic attributes of the work and its author’s acute powers of observation. In his influential preface to the work, Julius Hutchinson made much of Lucy Hutchinson’s exemplary qualities as wife, mother and mistress of a household, setting the tone for subsequent re-workings and adaptations of the Memoirs which were to portray Hutchinson as a paragon of domestic virtue. Gheeraert shows how key figures within an interpretive community – here, a literary editor – not only intuit the horizon of readerly expectation but also conspire to shape and service it through significant textual edits.

5Pierre Labrune’s contribution deals with the unintended consequences of censorious reception, showing what happens when a self-legitimizing interpretive community attempts censorship of a text – and conspicuously fails. The process is explored with regard to the reception of Samuel Foote’s play The Minor (1760). Controversially, The Minor quoted the language of the Scriptures with satirical intent, in an attack on Methodism involving a caricature of one of its founders, George Whitefield. The scandal that ensued provided the oxygen of publicity, generated a slew of imitations and served as an object lesson in the perverse effects of policing reception.

6Amélie Macaud shifts our focus to the contemporary phenomenon of online communities and their attempts to safeguard a writer’s legacy. She tracks reception as it moves online, where ‘niches’ assemble like-minded fans who coalesce around a shared interest. Digital fandom requires a rethinking of Fish’s (pre-digital) concept of interpretive community. With the advent of online forums and social media platforms, we enter the realm of a participatory, popular culture where channels of communication allow real-time exchanges between geographically distant contributors; opinions circulate and consensus is built in a flash. Reading and commentary are practised as socially inclusive activities, open to all. Whether or not a virtual community of readers will share Fish’s “structure of interests and understood goals” (Fish 1980, 333) is an open question; but the manner of its engagement, in the instance explored by Macaud, commands attention. Building a case around the issue of John Martin’s intrusive editing of Bukowski’s poetry, outraged readers ready themselves for battle and mobilize military metaphor; their interventions bristle with affect, their judgments are expressed in raw, sometimes inflammatory language. On one level, this heated reception of a text betrayed is a study in the emotive, polarising rhetoric rife on internet forums and social media platforms; on another, it is a salutary reminder that affect is, after all, the repressed primum mobile of all hermeneutic endeavour.

7The activities of interpretive communities are not, as we have seen, exclusively predicated on text. They are also deeply implicated in the world of artefact and sensation. The ‘material turn’ informing Roger Chartier’s work on book history also drives the research of Charlotte Ribeyrol, where it takes a different path. Ribeyrol’s research focuses on colour and its reception. The phenomenon of colour inhabits an unstable space, at the intersection of a corruptible materiality (such as pigment, paint or dye), and a variable parameter: that of embodied vision. Technically, colour is a perception enabled by an object’s absorption of light; it exists in the eye of the beholder but is also, incontrovertibly, a property of the phenomenal world and a shared cultural experience with affective valence – as Ribeyrol points out, the colour palette commonly associated with Victorian England is dull and grey – the very adjective ‘Dickensian’ carries undertones of drabness and despondency. In her article, Ribeyrol draws attention to the problem of culturally relative judgments, and explains the rationale behind a recent exhibition which she co-curated at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (2024). She identifies a “chromatic turn” occurring in the 1850s, spurred by innovations in the perception and production of colour, which challenged received ideas and had a profound impact on reception aesthetics in the field of 19^th century visual art, fashion and design. We might say, with Jauss, that the chromatic turn initiates nothing less than a “change of horizon”, altering the perceptual filters through which colour might be understood, and the past visualised.

8Key to the exhibition’s success was its reception by an informal and unpredictable interpretive community of visitors. In order to create an immersive experience for visitors of all ages, the curators supplied objects favouring modes of embodied intellection. These included the zoetrope and magic lantern, along with auditory stimuli.

9Strategies such as these, promoting corporeal immersion and multisensory engagement, are increasingly common in the museum space. They take reception aesthetics into areas where the body and senses are fully integrated into the meaning-making process and reception is, at least in part, physically enacted. This relativizes the privileged organ of perception/intellection – the eye – and opens new avenues of bodily participation for the spectator/viewer. It is in this spirit that Inbal Strauss encourages a critique of the primacy of perception – or what she terms “ocular privilege” – and a move towards multisensoriality, which, she maintains, takes its cue from the contemporary artwork. Strauss argues that XX^th and XXI^st century artworks are to be apprehended through a multisensory aesthetics, as a consequence of a paradigm shift: a static object soliciting the eye has surrendered its dominance, giving way to dynamic works inviting processes of co-construction. In an original and highly suggestive move, Strauss suggests we might base this new aesthetics of reception on modes of sensory interplay with everyday objects, considering the latter from a design perspective inspired by Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (2013).

10Staying within the broad domain of the visual arts, we turn next to the contributions of Nathalie Martinière, Cat Dawson and Valérie Favre, who examine aesthetic responses as acts of resistance, inviting the reader to consider the political dimension of reception and its potential for critique. We come up against the co-implication of the aesthetic and the political and are reminded that no act of interpretive appropriation occurs in an ideological vacuum – an aesthetics of reception is always informed by (and symptomatic of) a socio-political conjuncture. Nathalie Martinière focuses on Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novella, Heart of Darkness, as adapted in the ‘text and image’ format of two recent graphic novels. Authored respectively by Anyango and Mairowitz (2010), and Miquel and Godart (2014), these 21^st century adaptations are inevitably marked by the postcolonial critique of imperial power. Their critical force derives, in part, from aesthetic preferences proper to the medium – the layout of panel and grid, the use of colour – but also from bold narrative choices, such as the inclusion of geographical and historical detail absent in the original text. In foregrounding historical context and providing graphic depictions of horror, these contemporary receptions of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness bear witness to the vitality of a canonical text, inscribing it into an altered horizon of expectation as they render visually explicit the violence and trauma of the colonial past.

11With Cat Dawson and Valérie Favre we move into the area of performance art, specifically the work of American philosopher and conceptual artist Adrian Piper, and British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson. Dawson examines Adrian Piper’s extended project The Mythic Being (1973-1975), which stages the merging of a male alter ego with aspects of Piper’s personal history in a mixed media format. Dawson warns against the temptations of reading the Mythic figure’s race or gender as fixed, and suggests how such readings fall short. The author argues in favour of the Mythic Being’s ultimate fungibility, underlining the contingent nature of identity, the ineradicable differences and slippages within identities which are socially assigned. Piper’s project, reliant on the notion of ‘passing’, operates as a creative counter-interpellation – or series of counter-interpellations – levelled at a cultural gaze which is, by default, heteronormative and racializing. An enabling reception of Piper’s Mythic Being, Dawson suggests, would keep the indeterminacies of its positionality in play, favouring a “politics of coalition” among constituencies subjected to the injurious and constraining interpellations of the dominant cultural gaze. Valérie Favre’s work resonates strongly with Dawson’s: she also deals with a conceptual performance piece, “The Dreadlock Hoax” (2014) by multimedia artist and performance poet Kabe Wilson, in which the notion of ‘passing’ once again plays a pivotal role. Favre reads Wilson’s work as an explicit counter-interpellation or instance of talking back addressed to Virginia Woolf, questioning the offensively racializing overtones of Woolf’s writing, and enabling Wilson to assert agency through a creative disassembling and reassembling of Woolf’s text. Favre and Martinière show us how politically engaged forms of XXI^st century performance art and graphic adaptation respond to – or receive – canonical Modernist texts in ways that complicate, expand and renew existing bodies of interpretation.

12As will be clear from the above, the contributors to this issue explore the notion of reception aesthetics from multiple standpoints. What unites them is a sense of the continuing pertinence of seminal insights elaborated by theorists like Jauss, Iser and Fish; what is equally in evidence is the productive potential of reception as a key concept in the humanities, as it continues to evolve on contact with new disciplines, new media and changing horizons of expectation.