It is an international trend that not only the reading proficiency of young readers is declining, but also their reading motivation is diminishing. Consequently, for educators, literature education becomes increasingly challenging. In the classroom – from primary education to higher education, including teacher training programmes – there are growing cohorts of students who rarely or never read, and sometimes explicitly express their unwillingness to do so.

Simultaneously, in these same classrooms, there are students who devour one book after another and discuss their reading enthusiasm online with like-minded individuals, for example, through the popular hashtag #BookTok. This group also presents challenges in literature pedagogy, as their affective readings of fantasy and romance constitute a literacy practice of a fundamentally different nature than the meticulous reading of literary texts in a classroom context. While this group may not require legitimisation for their volitional reading practices, literary reading for school purposes certainly does.

The central inquiry of this symposium revolves around how we can justify our literature education in an era where literary reading faces pressures while concurrently experiencing flourishing within an evolving media landscape.