The Reception Theory in Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature

The close bond between science and technology most often brings about chances and challenges the recognition of which can be of great help to researchers and scholars in these areas. The domains of literary criticism and comparative literature share such a great extent of grounds and notions that the border between them is sometimes difficult to define. One of the common grounds between literary criticism and comparative literature is the Reception Theory. By using the descriptive and analytic methods in this article, the researchers try to find the roots and principles of this theory, and to differentiate between its position in literary criticism and comparative literature. The results reveal the Reception Theory has been capable of filling the basic gap that exists in the literary criticism regarding the role of the reader; at the same time, the theory can help enrich the French and the American schools of comparative literature.