Proceedings of the Everyday Reading of Literature Symposium (PERLS)
Synopsis
This volume of proceedings is one of the main outcomes of the research project called Remembering Literature in Everyday Life (ReLEL or PoKUS in Croatian), which was funded by the Croatian Science Foundation in the period between 2021 and 2026. To fulfill its main mission of providing and expanding the current academic overview of Everyday reading of literature, a two-day symposium by that name was organized by the project in September 2025 in Zagreb, Croatia. Thirty-two abstracts were selected for the symposium, along with two keynote speeches by Rita Felski and Astrid Erll. Nineteen of those presentations were further refined and now make up this volume, which is divided into three parts according to which aspects of everyday reading the authors chose to focus on most: historical and authorial (Part I), affective and emotional aspects (Part II), or social and technological (Part III). The examined reading populations include various countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America, but also a global audience in the papers dealing with internet audiences. The contributions range from poetry across autobiography and novels to children’s literature, so the breadth of everyday reading is well represented both spatially and textually. In all, this volume represents the most sustained international effort to address the issue of the overlooked majority of 99% of non-professional readers who make up the vast majority of the reading public of literature, and whose experiences are examined and set forth to shine in this volume of PERLS.
Chapters
-
Introductory note
-
PART I HISTORICAL AND AUTHORIAL ASPECTS
-
Reconstructing Readers’ Tastes through Topic Modeling of Private Poetry Anthologies
-
Reading in Practice: Citation as a Route to Black Reading Cultures in Early Twentieth Century South Africa
-
“good book it made me want to die”: The affected and affective readings of a controversial early-20th-century queer tragedy
-
Reading Habits of Jewish Families in Zagreb Between the Two World Wars
-
Empirical Literary Memory Studies and the Memory of Complicity in Flemish Fiction about World War II
-
PART II AFFECTIVE AND EMOTIONAL ASPECTS
-
“I don’t know why this most horrible part comes up to me now…”. A Framework for Linking Textual Dimensions of Child Sexual Abuse Fiction to Reader Responses
-
The materiality of reading and its affective implications in people’s everyday lives: Insights from the reading conversations
-
Reading the trauma of eating disorders: Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1997) and Elena and Claire Dunkle's Elena Vanishing (2015)
-
Identifying reading emotions: computer-assisted analysis of a corpus of letters from French contemporary readers
-
Instagram shelfies and everyday readings of Heartstopper
-
Bound Together: Understanding the Wellbeing Potential of Shared Reading
-
What do we feel when we read: Interpretation of Results of the Readers' Survey
-
PART III SOCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL ASPECTS
-
Virginia Woolf and the New Common Reader
-
Online platforms and everyday reading: the Russian case
-
Remediation and attachment in the reading of e-books*
-
Library Lives: Everyday Reading and Cultural Change in Delhi
-
Memoir Reading, Remembering, and Reflecting on Social Media
-
Engaging with Political Violence in Fiction: readers, readings, and responses
-
Comparing Human and AI Literary Summaries: Insights from Lapitch
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Categories
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
