Question

Interpretive community theory definition

Answer 1

Interpretive communities are a theoretical concept stemming from reader-response criticism and publicized by Stanley Fish although it was in use in other fields and may be found as early as 1964 in the "Historical News and Notices" of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly (p. 98) and also, and again before Fish's usage, in Richard Crouter's 1974 "H. Reinhold Neibuhr and Stoicism" in The Journal of Religious Ethics. They appeared in an article by Fish in 1976 entitled "Interpreting the Variorum".[1] Fish's theory states that a text does not have meaning outside of a set of cultural assumptions regarding both what the characters mean and how they should be interpreted.