Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Persephone and Liminality in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and Art
1st Edition
By Dorota Osińska
December 02, 2026
Exploring canonical alongside lesser-known works, Persephone and Liminality in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and Art provides a series of close readings of nineteenth-century British poetry and paintings that reinterpret the image of Persephone as the figure associated with a liminal experience...
Thomas De Quincey in the Context of Late-Romantic Intellectuals
1st Edition
By Yingjie Duan
November 27, 2026
Thomas De Quincey in the Context of Late-Romantic Intellectuals enriches comprehension of De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater” persona by interpreting it as a late-Romantic intellectual’s self-fashioning. This book revisits De Quincey’s ingrained literary image as “English Opium-Eater,” an image easily ...
Melville’s (Dis)Orders: Four Transatlantic Dialogues on Essence, Existence, and the Truth of Things
1st Edition
By Paweł Jędrzejko, John Matteson
October 30, 2026
Melville’s (Dis)Orders offers a dialogical re-reading of Herman Melville as a thinker of moral, political, and existential disorder, tracing how his literary imagination confronts authority, law, violence, and ethical responsibility in modernity. Combining literary analysis with philosophical ...
Dickens from Shakespeare, Fuseli and Blake: Imagination and Jealousy in Art and Literature
1st Edition
By Jeremy Tambling
September 11, 2026
Dickens says he concentrates on 'the romantic side of familiar things', and so highlights the visionary, non-realist, uncanny nature of his writing. This book delves into the sources of that through Shakespeare, and Fuseli, the great artist who imagined scenes from Shakespeare and who created the '...
Beauty in the Western Canon
1st Edition
By Alberto Castelli
August 26, 2026
Dadaist works, such as Duchamp’s ready-mades, famously challenge the connection between art and the aesthetic by presenting objects of little or no aesthetic interest, such as urinals, snow shovels, and bicycles, as art. From impressionist paintings to unmade beds exhibited in galleries, this ...
Decentering the Nineteenth Century Novel: Literature and Psychology
1st Edition
By Alberto Castelli
August 26, 2026
This groundbreaking monograph offers readers a profound exploration of nineteenth-century literature. Rather than presenting these works as a mere succession of literary movements, the author weaves romanticism, realism, gothic, and decadence into a coherent tapestry united by a singular focus: the...
Oscar Wilde and Nihilism
1st Edition
By Colin Cavendish-Jones
June 21, 2026
Oscar Wilde and Nihilism examines Wilde’s major works in the context of nineteenth-century philosophical nihilism and the Victorian religious unsettlement. The book covers Wilde’s plays, the fairy tales, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the critical writings, and De Profundis to show how Wilde’s ...
Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Petitioning Women
1st Edition
By Amy Dunham Strand
May 21, 2026
Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how American women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Emily Dickinson translated petitioning – a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or ...
Reading the Romantic Ridiculous
1st Edition
By Andrew McInnes, Rita J. Dashwood
May 21, 2026
Reading The Romantic Ridiculous aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. Building on recent work that decentres the myth of the solitary genius, this duograph theorises the ridiculous as an alternative affect to the sublime, privileging collective laughter above solitude ...
Capital as Literature: Marx Against Himself
1st Edition
By Perry Meisel
April 23, 2026
Studies of Marx, particularly of his masterwork Capital (1867), are as a rule tutelary—they attempt to explain him. Even literary readers of Marx, from Raymond Williams to Fredric Jameson, seek to secure Marxist tenets by means of Marxian style. ‘Capital’ as Literature: Marx Against Himself departs...
The Rossetti Legacy: Victorian Poetry, Pre-Raphaelite Art, and the Exploration of Self-Identity
1st Edition
By Charlotte Xiaoqian Cai
April 17, 2026
This groundbreaking study reveals how the Rossetti siblings revolutionized Victorian conceptions of selfhood through a sophisticated dialectic that transcends conventional binaries – matter and spirit, sacred and secular love, strength and vulnerability, divinity and depravity. While their ...
Victorian Humor: A History, a Narrative Theory, and the Experience of Reading
1st Edition
By Glynnis Cox
March 20, 2026
Humor and the novel both belong, in important ways, to the nineteenth century. It is in the nineteenth century that we saw an unprecedented outpouring of novels and short stories, and it was also in the nineteenth century when humor emerged as the dominant term through which the comic was described...