The Reader of Defamatory Texts

In many, especially English, defamation cases,the court often speaks of ``the average reader',``the reasonable reader' or similar concepts,which does not refer to any flesh-and-bloodreader of the defamatory text, but is a type ofconstruct of what the court thinks would be thenormal reaction of a person to an allegedlydefamatory text. This concept is compared to asimilar phenomenon found in literary theory inthe persona of the implied reader, created bythe (implied) author as having a given set ofvalues which will lead to an appreciativeinterpretation of the literary work. The papercompares the parallel concepts in the twofields.