Before the emerge of reception theory, the great changes in political, cultural even economic parts in west countries, especially in German, are the direct sources of this theory(Zhu Liyuan 2004).
The 20th century is worth being called “the century of criticism”. Western criticism in this hundred years has experienced three major theoretical shift, including the writer-centered theory which takes the writer’s writing idea as the fundamental basis of understanding the meaning of the work, the text-centered theory which takes the text’s language construction as the basis and the reader-centered theory which takes readers’ reading, creative understanding as the direct source of the generation of the literature meaning.
In numerous literary theories, reception aesthetics with its huge breakthrough towards previous literary theory, the traditional way of focusing on the study of the author and works for the first time, taking readers as the center of literary movement, has become one of today’s biggest influential genre.