We are witnessing a world increasingly shaped by political polarization, poverty, forced migration, mass atrocities, fear, social fragmentation, and ecological devastation. While class inequality and systemic injustice have long structured social life, algorithmic media increasingly mediate how these conditions are perceived, discussed, and experienced. Rather than fostering publics capable of collective reflection and action, they often fragment attention into personalized spheres, privileging individual visibility over collective engagement. Yet these conditions make the need for shared ways of thinking and imagining the present more urgent than ever.

We often describe our time as one of post-truth, misinformation, and competing narratives. Yet the very materiality of social, economic, and political life continues to assert itself through precarious labour, homelessness, displacement, debt, hunger, war, and the erosion of the future. The question, then, is not simply whether literature can represent reality, but how it makes social reality visible and thinkable. Matters about literary form under current social circumstances concern not only literary production but also literary circulation. At a moment when publishing, distribution, translation, and digital visibility are increasingly shaped by market logics and corporate platforms, how do literary works find their readers? Through what institutions, publics, and networks can literature still circulate across fragmented social worlds? Can literature continue to create spaces for dialogue, shared reflection, and collective imagination under these conditions?

We invite contributions from across the humanities that engage with these questions. We welcome theoretical reflections on literature and the conditions of the present, comparative analyses, and close readings of literary texts. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Literary forms and styles developed under conditions of political repression

• Literary form and the representation of poverty, war, migration, precarity, and ecological crisis

• Circulation of literature and the formation of reading publics

• Reading communities, book clubs, and other collective practices of literary engagement

• Prison literature and the literary production of solidarity and community

• Socialist realism and other literary traditions that imagine collective life

• Narrative strategies that foreground collective identities over individualized despair

• Publishing, translation, and literary infrastructures

• Literature as a space for collective imagination and political solidarity

• Reconsidering testimony and witnessing

• Literature under conditions of urgency

• Everyday life as a site of resistance and repair