Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic Literary Theory and Cultural Studies.

With a specific focus on rhetoric, some, such as Walter Ong, have suggested that the audience is a construct made up by the rhetor and the rhetorical situation the text is addressing. Others, such as Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor have said writers and speakers actually can target their communication to address a real audience. Some others like Ede and Lunsford try to mingle these two approaches and create situations where audience is fictionalized, as Ong would say, but in recognition of some real attributes of the actual audience.

There is also a wide range of media studies and communication studies theories about the audience s role in any kind of mediated Communication. A sub-culturally focussed and Marxism-inflected take on the subject arose as the New audience theory or Active Audience Theory from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1980s.

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