Proceedings of the Everyday Reading of Literature Symposium (PERLS)

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.