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.
Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film
1st Edition
By Krzysztof Rowiński
April 23, 2026
The book focuses on the concept of non-redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields. Examining literature and film from mid-twentieth...
The Bildungsroman: Re-birth, Travels, and Conversations Across the Mediterranean, Irish, and Red Seas
1st Edition
By Leen Bou Nassereddine
April 06, 2026
The book The Bildungsroman: Re-birth, Travels, and Conversations Across the Mediterranean, Irish, and Red Seas aims to explore the history and evolution of the bildungsroman genre by moving beyond its traditional Eurocentric foundations, often associated with Goethe as the archetype of the genre. ...
Convergence of East-West Poetics: Williams’s Negotiation with the Chinese Landscape Tradition
1st Edition
By Zhanghui Yang
December 26, 2025
The present book examines William Carlos Williams’s negotiation with cultural modes and systems of the Chinese landscape tradition in his landscape writing. Focusing on Walliams’s landscape modes of landscape with(out) infused emotions, the book builds a linkage between their interactions with...
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 ...
Epiphanies in the Modernist Short Story: Italian and English Perspectives
1st Edition
By Valeria Taddei
September 29, 2025
The poetics of epiphany have long been recognised as a broad aesthetic trend of modernism, related to the power of art to reveal the hidden essence of reality. Yet the critical use of the concept is still contested, complicated by the fact that in many modernist works exceptional moments are ...
The Literary Beach: History and Aesthetics of a Modern Topos
1st Edition
Edited
By Carsten Meiner, Katrine Helene Andersen
September 29, 2025
As a geo-historical place, the beach integrates a variety of characteristics and functions so multiple that they tend to contradict each other. The beach is both a place of work and trade but also of leisure; it is both a place of therapy and health but also of migration, war, and death; it is a ...
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 the 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 22, 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 ...