This dissertation is a study of 'reception theory' in literary criticism. Chapter one defines the theory in Western criticism and the rest of the dissertation deals with the chronological development of the 'meaning theory' in classic Arabic criticism. Chapter one examines Western reception theory in terms of its : definition, the reasons for its appearance in criticism, its features in text analysis, and its most leading theorists. Chapter two (Criticisin in the Third Century Hegira) is concerned with the structural traits of the opening of the pre-Islamic Arabian poem, and the reciprocal role of the author (the poet) and the reader in producing text through literary appreciation, which played a significant role in the evaluation of the text's structure. Arab critics in the third century used poetical and prosaic terms that represented the forms of literary reception at that time. Criticism in this - century was to constitute the genesis of a trend that emphasized the role of the text receiver and the questioning of the text instead of merely taking it for grounded. Chapter three deals with the critics of the fourth and fifth centuries, and their attempts to search for the aesthetic qualities of literary texts. The appearance of the 'contact-text', and the reception's correlation and the periodicity brought about several works that documented a new type of text, through textual historism. This led to the emergence of aesthetic textual appreciation on the part of both the author and the reader. In these two centuries, Arabic criticism witnessed the phenomenon of 'reader response' in which the text was interpreted differently by the poet, the reader, and the critic, which revealed the extent of interacting among them, Abdualkahir Al-Jurjani, who lived at that time, attempted to establish solid norms for the 'meaning theory', laying out the steps that the reader should follow in textual exegesis. The concept of 'meaning theory' reached is apogee with Al-Jurjani and, in essence, is not different from what Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser advocated in the 20thc.