We are looking for papers for our volume 'Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday'. The collection will build on and extend work coming out of a conference, 'The Prosaic imaginary', held at the University of Sydney, NSW, Australia in July 2014. We aim to explore the privileged relationship between the novel genre and categories of the 'prosaic' or 'everyday'. Building on John Plotz's notion of the novel as exemplary 'portable property', we seek to interrogate the relationship between novel-reading as an everyday activity and the novel's prosaic subject matter, whether this is conceived as material object, cultural practice, or speech act.

Contributions should question how the prosaic or portable shapes the formal and generic structure of a given text, as well as how the portability of textual properties – such as textually encoded affective relationships between characters, readers, and authors – defines critical method. Topics could include the novel and things, readerships of the novel, the novel and the institutionalization of affect, or the novel and the digital everyday.

Please send abstracts of 200 words Jarrad Coggle at jcog8088@uni.sydney.edu.au

Deadline for abstract submission: May 31st, 2015.
For more information, please write to the following: