Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics in American Literature and Culture.
Texting the Nation: Agencies and Actions in the Declaration of Independence
1st Edition
By Michael Ditmore
November 12, 2025
Texting the Nation closely parses the Declaration of Independence's text and logical argument in grammatical and rhetorical terms to highlight patterns of agency, from the passive voice construction and re-arranged parallel arrangement of political principles to the composition history and meaning ...
Unveiling Structures in Colson Whitehead’s Fiction
1st Edition
By Paula Martín-Salván
November 04, 2025
This book offers a comprehensive critical analysis of Colson Whitehead’s fiction, positioning him as a key figure in both African American literature and the global “turn to genre.” It explores how Whitehead employs conventions from popular genres—such as detective, zombie, and caper stories—not ...
The Emergence of American Occidentalism in Literature and Culture: The Disguised Identity
1st Edition
By Muthanna Al-Janabi
October 28, 2025
The book presents an innovative conceptualization of Western thought, casting the discourse of black and white intellectuals and politicians as a treatise on Occidentalism. It envisions American Occidentalism as an inner discourse where Critical Occidentalists interact textually and historically in...
The Rise of Sensationalism in American Literature and Culture: 1620-1860
1st Edition
By Alexander Moudrov
September 05, 2025
The Rise of Sensationalism in American Literature and Culture: 1620‑1860 argues that the rise of the American tradition of sensationalism can be better understood in the transatlantic context. Early American writers were unquestionably influenced by various forms of European sensationalism. At the ...
Transnational and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western American Culture: The Nomadic West
1st Edition
Edited
By Ángel Chaparro Sainz
May 29, 2025
The book offers a diverse and rich picture of current research on the literature and culture of the American West. The book privileges transnational and interdisciplinary approaches, aiming to understand how Western iconography has moved well beyond both national limits and literary borders, ...
Unhappy Beginnings: Narratives of Precarity, Failure, and Resistance in North American Texts
1st Edition
Edited
By Isabel González-Díaz, Fabián Orán-Llarena
May 05, 2025
This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured...
The Jew in the American War Novel: 1920s–2020s
1st Edition
By Ohad Reznick
March 30, 2025
This is the first book of its kind to provide an analysis of the representation of Jews in American war novels throughout the long twentieth century. This study delineates the intricate relationship between Jews and wars. Are Jews depicted as draft dodgers or heroes in American war fiction? How do ...
Zen, Meaning, and Craft in Jane Hirshfield's Poetry: Heartshoots
1st Edition
By Deirdre C. Byrne, Garth J. Mason
February 17, 2025
Zen, Meaning, and Craft in Jane Hirshfield’s Poetry: Heartshoots is the first scholarly volume to be dedicated to the large body of work produced by North American Zen poet, Jane Hirshfield. The volume is co-authored by a Zen Buddhist scholar and a poetry scholar, who are both practising poets. Its...
Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo’s Novels
1st Edition
By Laila Sougri
December 18, 2024
This book is the first to explore technoculture in all of Don DeLillo’s novels. From Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020), the American author anatomizes the constantly changing relationship between culture and technology in overt and layered aspects of the characters’ experiences. Through a ...
Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction: Intersections, Performances, and Functions
1st Edition
By Joseph L. Coulombe
November 08, 2024
Humor and Masculinity in U.S. Fiction offers a pragmatic and theoretically informed model for analyzing how humor and gender intersect in key U.S. texts, bringing much-needed attention to the complex ways that humor can support and/or subvert reductive masculine codes and behaviors. Its argument ...
The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, and Iconic Authorship
1st Edition
By James L. Machor
October 07, 2024
Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In ...
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty
1st Edition
By George H. Jensen, Heidi Skurat Harris
July 31, 2024
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty is the first book-length study of Norman Maclean or any of his works. Since the publication of “A River Runs through It” in 1976, readers and critics have considered it to be one of the most carefully crafted stories in American ...