A novel that scandalised its first readers is set for schoolchildren three generations later, with not a word of it changed. Why, on Jauss’s account, does it now read as unremarkable?

D. The horizon of expectations shifted, closing aesthetic distance the work opened

Because the horizon moved. Aesthetic distance is the gap between a work and what its public expects, and a work that opens a wide gap teaches its successors to expect what it did. Three generations on, those expectations are ordinary, which is why the history of a work’s reception is part of the work rather than a record of opinions about it.