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.
Psychoanalysis and The Lord of the Rings: A Meltzerian Perspective on Frodo’s Journey
1st Edition
By Adrian Smith
February 25, 2026
Psychoanalysis and The Lord of the Rings offers a psychoanalytical perspective on Tolkien’s masterpiece, informed by the Kleinian school within psychoanalysis, especially the work of Donald Meltzer. Treating Tolkien’s work as a Bildungsroman, a forming novel or coming-of-age tale, this study tracks...
Theodore Dreiser and the Cultures of Travel
1st Edition
By Gary Totten
January 21, 2026
Theodore Dreiser and the Cultures of Travel examines Dreiser’s three published travel narratives, A Traveler at Forty (1913), A Hoosier Holiday (1916), and Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), along with his 1916–26 travel diaries for trips to Georgia, New Jersey, California, and Florida, and his ...
Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903-1929: Viewer, I Married Him
1st Edition
By Jamie Barlowe
December 26, 2025
Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903–1929 focuses on fifty-three silent film adaptations of the novels of acclaimed authors George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton....
An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plays in Théâtre complet
1st Edition
By Adrian van den Hoven
December 25, 2025
An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plays in Théâtre complet is the first volume to propose a critical analysis of all of Jean-Paul Sartre’s plays as published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2005. Viewing the plays in the context of Sartre’s philosophy, his prose writings and ...
Industrial Literature and Authors: Labor, Factory Utopias, and Testimonial Intent
1st Edition
By Bianca Rita Cataldi
December 25, 2025
In recent years, the field of literary studies at the international level has become more involved in the analysis of the so-called industrial literature, a literary genre that focuses on the literary representation of factory work and workers’ alienation. This book engages in the ongoing...
Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives: Hunger in Eden
1st Edition
Edited
By Jonas Elbousty, Roger Allen
December 25, 2025
Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives presents an intricate exploration into the life and literary universe of Mohamed Choukri, a towering figure in 20th-century Moroccan literature. Known primarily for his groundbreaking autobiographical work "al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī" (For Bread Alone), Choukri's literary...
Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing
1st Edition
By Luke Thurston
December 25, 2025
What is at stake in Freud’s enduring preoccupation with a process supposedly diverting sexuality into cultural activity? In this study, a leading scholar of psychoanalysis and literature re-opens the old question of sublimation in a critical reading that explores one of the last remaining puzzles ...
Angela Carter Translator and Translated: In the Workshop of Creation
1st Edition
Edited
By Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, Marie Emilie Walz
December 22, 2025
Angela Carter Translator and Translated situates the British writer Angela Carter within a global framework by documenting how foreign languages and cultures played a key role in her work, before gaining attention internationally today, notably in translation. A published translator who used ...
Food Places in Children's Literature
1st Edition
By Sabine Planka
December 18, 2025
Food Places in Children’s Literature analyses how food, place and social interactions are intertwined in children’s and young adult novels. This book sets out to analyse a range of children’s books from across the 20th and 21st centuries, each of which relate to specific kinds of places, from the ...
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...