The Circuit
The last block turns from the text to the people around it. Robert Darnton's communications circuit models the life of a book as a loop through six principal stations: author → publisher → printer → shipper → bookseller → reader, and back to the author, whose next book is shaped by what the last one met. Everything in the circuit is contingent — a printer's decision about format, a bookseller's shelf, a shipping route — and every station leaves marks readable in the object.
Reception: the reader as a condition of the work
Hans Robert Jauss's Konstanz lecture (1967) put the reader at the centre of literary history. His horizon of expectations is the set of assumptions a public brings to a work; the distance between that horizon and the work is its aesthetic distance, and it can be measured historically by how the first audience reacted. A work that entirely satisfies the horizon is consumed as entertainment; one too far outside it is not read at all; the interesting cases sit in between and move the horizon, which is why the same book can be scandalous in one generation and set for schoolchildren two later.
Wolfgang Iser gives the mechanism at the level of the page: a text is full of gaps (Leerstellen) which the reader must fill, and the work exists in the act of reading rather than on the paper. The implied reader is the reader the text builds into itself, not you, but the position you are invited to occupy.
Stanley Fish pushes furthest: interpretive communities produce both readers and texts, so the properties we find in a work are the properties our community's way of reading produces. Meaning is not in the text waiting; it is what a trained way of reading makes.
The literary field
Pierre Bourdieu (The Rules of Art) describes literature as a field with its own rules, structured by two opposed poles. At the autonomous pole, success is measured in symbolic capital, recognition by other producers, and commercial failure can even be evidence of integrity: Bourdieu calls it the economic world reversed. At the heteronomous pole, success is sales. Writers, publishers and prizes take positions relative to those poles, and consecration — canonisation, prizes, the syllabus — is the process by which symbolic capital is granted.
Counting instead of reading
Franco Moretti's distant reading asks what literary history looks like if you stop treating the canon as the field. Something like twenty thousand novels were published in nineteenth-century Britain. The canon holds perhaps two hundred. So the canon is around one per cent, and the other ninety-nine per cent, the great unread, is where the norms actually were. A claim about "the Victorian novel" built from twenty books is a claim about a tenth of a per cent of the evidence.
None of this replaces reading; it changes what a generalisation can rest on. Reading and counting answer different questions, and the sociology of reading is mostly about noticing when a question has quietly changed from one to the other.
Common pitfall: treating reception study as a survey of opinions about a fixed work. Jauss's claim is stronger, the work has no meaning independent of the horizons it has passed through, so its history of reception is part of the work rather than a record of what people thought about it.