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.
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 ...
Asian American War Stories: Trauma and Healing in Contemporary Asian American Literature
1st Edition
By Jeffrey Tyler Gibbons
May 27, 2024
Asian American War Stories examines contemporary Asian American literature that considers both the short-term and the long-term effects of war, trauma, and displacement on civilians, as well as the ways that individuals seek healing in the face of suffering. Through the works of contemporary ...
Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction: Elite Pluralism and Political Bosses in Three Post-War Novels
1st Edition
By David Smit
January 29, 2024
This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense ...
Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo
1st Edition
By Philipp Wolf
January 29, 2024
This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his 1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the development ...
Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937: Visual Narrative, Cultural Politics, Homoeroticism
1st Edition
By Grant F. Scott
January 29, 2024
This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an ...
Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic: A Study in Form, History, and Culture
1st Edition
By Wanlin Li
September 25, 2023
As part of a larger attempt to understand the dynamic interactions between gothic form and ideology, this volume focuses on a strong formal feature of the American gothic, "global ambiguity," and examines the important cultural work it performs in the nineteenth-century history of the genre. ...