Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
A Marxist Perspective on Select Fiction by Indian Writers from the Gulf: Narratives of the ‘Permanently Temporary’ Migrants
1st Edition
By Tasnima Yasmin
November 25, 2025
This book offers a critical lens to examine the socio-economic struggles and class dynamics of South Asian diasporic characters in Indian writing from the Gulf. It highlights how South Asian migrant characters remain hanging in a limbo in the exploitative neo-liberal capitalist structures of the ...
Hybridity, Identity and Belonging in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi: Writing Home
1st Edition
By James Davey
October 24, 2025
Hybridity, Identity and Belonging in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi: Writing Home explores how contemporary British poets navigate the complex and often contested concept of ‘home’. Focusing on the works of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi, as well as other contemporary poets, this book ...
Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novels: Writing Beyond English
1st Edition
By Birgit Neumann
September 19, 2025
Engaging with recent research in literary multilingualism studies, the global anglophone and comparative studies, this book theorizes so-called post-monolingual anglophone novels. Inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012), post-monolingual ...
Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor
1st Edition
By Michał Kisiel
August 08, 2025
Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor is a collection of four essays bringing Kantor’s and Beckett’s texts, theatres, and theories into conversation with deconstruction, new materialism, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. This book is dedicated to two artists rarely ...
Xueqin and Xakespeare: Reading The Story of the Stone through Hamlet
1st Edition
By Judith Forsyth
July 30, 2025
This monograph offers a detailed consideration of the five-volume novel written by Cao Xueqin and translated into English as The Story of the Stone, when read through William Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, A Tragedy in Five Acts. The book builds on the superlative David Hawkes/John ...
The Crisis of Liberal Democracy in Contemporary Novels: or The Continuation of History
1st Edition
By Leander Møller Gøttcke
April 21, 2025
This book explores how contemporary novels reflect a profound shift in Western culture, from the political optimism of the post-Cold War era to growing fears about the future of liberal democracy. Analysing four major works – Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle series, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, ...
Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-19th to the Early 21st Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Paromita Chakravarti, Mario Prayer
November 28, 2024
The ten chapters collected in this book manifest the current global interest in trans-border dialogues and trace the origins and development of Italian and Bengali internationalisms in the period from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. Despite having differing political statuses and lacking a ...
Perpetrators’ Legacies: Post-imperial Condition in Sebald and McEwan
1st Edition
By Vladimir Biti
October 15, 2024
The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who enmeshed in the hierarchies of power inherited from their imperial times, strive to disentangle themselves from that burdensome legacy. To achieve this, they undertake a subtle detachment from the ...
Modern Indian Literature as Cosmopolis: Conversations with Hanuman
1st Edition
By Didier Coste
October 09, 2024
This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. It shows how, since the mid-19th century, Indian literary modernity pursued the conjunction of the ...
Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims
1st Edition
By Epsita Halder
October 09, 2024
Analysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the...
A Comparative Reading of Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism: Come Back Babar
1st Edition
By Andrew Nyongesa, John Mugubi
October 07, 2024
This book is response to the recent surge of formidable voices that consistently demean and attempt to reverse the gains of pan-Africanism. Besides questioning its relevance, these voices supplant essential tenets of pan-Africanism – Blackness, the narrative of Return, sanctity of the ancestral ...
A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature: Against Origins and Destinations
1st Edition
By Didier Coste
August 26, 2024
This cross-disciplinary approach to literary reading of any provenance based on an “experimental cosmopolitan” epistemology de- and recontextualizes the texts from the points of view of multiple cultures and historical moments, enriching interpretation and aesthetic experience beyond the ...