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Short link: ema.uzh.ch/R373A
Thursday, Mar 19 – Mar 20, 2026 UZH Main building (KOL-G-217)
Enough places available
The conference New Adult Fiction: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Popular Phenomenon is dedicated to a popular literary field that currently mobilises large readerships, but is at the same time contested aesthetically, culturally and institutionally. Between arts and culture criticism, BookTok euphoria and cautious academic curiosity, New Adult Fiction is often read either as market-driven entertainment or as a symptomatic crisis genre. The conference counters this with a differentiated, interdisciplinary perspective and asks how the phenomenon can be conceived in literary studies and (empirical) cultural studies as a dynamic space of negotiation in which literary forms, social conflicts – especially around gender and sexuality – and aesthetic practices are reconfigured. The conference focuses on genres, tropes and emotional structures as cultural forms in which experiences of growing up in the present are condensed. The contributions examine New Adult as an emotional world of experience, as a crossover phenomenon between high and popular culture, as politicised queer or critically heterosexual love and crisis literature, and as a transmedial interplay of texts, platforms and reading cultures. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
