Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
About the Book Series
From Joyce to Rushdie, Modernism to Food Writing, Routledge Studies in Twentieth Century Literature looks at both the literature and culture of the 20th century. This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering literature alongside religion, popular culture, race, gender, ecology, travel, class, space, and other subjects, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Disability, Illness, and the Vampire in Literature and Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Drumlin N.M. Crape, Brooke Cameron
December 15, 2025
Drumlin N.M. Crape and Brooke Cameron’s Disability, Illness, and the Vampire in Literature and Culture is an edited collection of essays addressing a wide range of literary depictions of vampirism and disability, from early and formative Victorian vampire stories like Eric Stenbock’s ‘The...
Modernism’s Queer Parents: Parenthood in Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust
1st Edition
By Anchit Sathi
December 02, 2025
This volume offers the first critical examination of how societal pressures compelling individuals towards parenthood are experienced, processed, and enacted by queer characters in selected works by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust—authors now widely regarded as queer, despite not ...
Reading T. S. Eliot: The Rose Garden and After (1930s–1950s)
1st Edition
Edited
By Dídac Llorens-Cubedo, Viorica Patea
November 19, 2025
In “Burnt Norton,” the poetic speaker enters a rose garden, a space of envisioned timeless illumination. This experience sets in motion a spiritual quest, which will confer unity upon Four Quartets. For the poet himself, it inaugurates a creative phase (mid-1930s to late-1950s) that strengthens his...
D. H. Lawrence and Ambivalence in the Age of Modernity: Rereading Midlands Novels and Wartime Writings in Social and Political Contexts
1st Edition
By Gaku Iwai
October 26, 2025
D. H. Lawrence is renowned for his scathing criticism of the ruling class, industrialisation of the country and wartime patriotism. However, his texts bear the imprint of contemporary dominant ideologies and discourses of the period. Comparing Lawrence’s texts to various major and minor ...
Virginia Woolf’s Microgenesis: Mental States and Conceptual Worlds
1st Edition
By James Kearns
September 11, 2025
Virginia Woolf’s Microgenesis engages with Virginia Woolf’s writings in the context of her own unique methodological approach to mind, to meaning, and to making whole. This volume argues that this preoccupation with the metaphysics of “wholeness,” a dread, indeed, of both fragmentation and what ...
Tennessee Williams’s America: Homes, Families, Exiles
1st Edition
By Ahmed Honeini
September 10, 2025
Tennessee Williams’s America is the first full-length study of homes, families, and familial exile in the plays of Tennessee Williams. The central argument of this book is that Williams’s vision of American life in his plays is predicated upon challenging the traditional idea of the home and family...
Puzzling Modernism in Twentieth-Century Literature
1st Edition
By Laura Lorhan
July 31, 2025
Puzzling Modernism in Twentieth-Century Literature identifies a sustained interest in puzzles, such as the jigsaw and Fifteen Puzzle, dating back to the 1880s in the United States, and argues that puzzles appealed to modernist authors because they offer a framework for acknowledging the grim ...
An Analysis of Chinese Literature in the New Era: Navigating Identity and Modernity
1st Edition
By Mao Nie
July 30, 2025
An Analysis of Chinese Literature in the New Era serves as an essential window for international audiences to understand the rapid development of China over more than three decades and offers a critical interpretation of Chinese literature during this time. Due to the multifaceted influences of ...
Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart: Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf
1st Edition
By Candice Kent
July 30, 2025
Durée as Einstein-in-the-Heart traces the trajectory of modernist interaction with Bergson and Einstein through the works of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and Mary Butts (1890–1937). It presents an overview of critical approaches that focus on time in Woolf’s novels, and that foreground Bergson in ...
Owen Barfield’s Poetry, Drama, and Fiction: Rider on Pegasus
1st Edition
By Jeffrey Hipolito
July 30, 2025
Owen Barfield influenced a diverse range of writers that includes T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, and Saul Bellow, and Owen Barfield's Poetry, Drama, and Fiction is the first book to comprehensively explore and assess the literary career of the "fourth Inkling," Owen ...
Reading James Joyce and Orhan Pamuk: A Modernist Bildung at Work
1st Edition
By Petru Golban
July 23, 2025
Reading James Joyce and Orhan Pamuk reveals how by embracing the idea that an individual subject and history (of a nation and the city) mutually shape identities as formative processes, James Joyce and Orhan Pamuk create “portraits” adapting bildung to chart the becoming of the protagonist ...
The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien
1st Edition
By Nicholas Birns
June 27, 2025
This volume analyzes the literary role played by history in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It argues that the events of The Lord of the Rings are placed against the background of an already- existing history, both in reality and in the fictional worlds of the books. History is unfolded in various ...