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-blood reader of the defamatory text, but is a type of construct of what the court thinks would be the normal reaction of a person to an allegedly defamatory text. This concept is compared to a similar phenomenon found in literary theory in the persona of the implied reader, created by the (implied) author as having a given set of values which will lead to an appreciative interpretation of the literary work. The paper compares the parallel concepts in the two fields.