Routledge Focus on Literature
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: The Alternative Dystopian Imagination
1st Edition
By Eva Pelayo Sañudo
May 21, 2026
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: The Alternative Dystopian Imagination aims to offer innovative perspectives for the analysis of Nobel-prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s oeuvre through a focus on the genre of science fiction, particularly the novel Never Let Me Go (2005). The study proposes the...
Reading Modernity, Modernism and Religion Today: Spinoza and Van Gogh
1st Edition
By Patrick Grant
May 21, 2026
Feelings of rootlessness, fragmentation and loneliness are endemic in today’s secular societies. In the late nineteenth century, Émile Durkheim described this kind of social malaise as anomie, a concept this book locates within a historical narrative of the emergence of Modernism from Modernity. ...
Romantic Responses to Revolution through Miltonic Ideas of the Fall
1st Edition
By Callum Fraser
May 21, 2026
Romantic Responses to Revolution through Miltonic Ideas of the Fall explores the influence of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, on a range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers. Specifically, the book examines the way in which these writers use the Fall, and the notion of ‘fallenness’—as ...
The Sagas of Icelanders: An Introduction to All Forty Sagas with Summaries
1st Edition
By Annette Lassen
May 21, 2026
This book offers an accessible and concise introduction to the sagas of Icelanders, perfect for both general and academic readers. Authored by a recognized expert, it immerses readers in the sagas’ world, exploring their cultural and historical context. The book surveys major themes such as belief ...
Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir: Poetics, Praxis, and Politics
1st Edition
By Yolanda M. Manora
May 05, 2026
Fragmented Forms in African American Women’s Memoir examines fragment as formal praxis in autobiographical works by Black women makers, critics and creatives, including Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman, and Beyonce Knowles. Exploring a range of forms, from the lyric fragment to the ellipses, from ...
Pale Fire, Nabokov’s Art and Shakespeare’s Magic
1st Edition
By Gerard de Vries
April 23, 2026
This manuscript examines Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, widely regarded as his most challenging and critically acclaimed work. While Lolita remains Nabokov's best-known novel, Pale Fire has generated the most sustained scholarly attention and interpretive debate among literary critics. Existing ...
Memes and Meaning: Presence and Transcendence in Literature
1st Edition
By Patrycja Austin, Simon Perry
April 17, 2026
Drawing from literature, philosophy, theology, and cultural critique, this short and accessible book challenges modern conceptions of meaning as something to be consumed rather than created. The book reframes meaning as an act of mediation, not transmission. Meaning is not the successful delivery ...
Reading the Racial Encounter in Multi-Media Texts
1st Edition
By Neil Cocks
February 16, 2026
Reading the Racial Encounter engages constructions of race through the analysis of scenes of meeting or encounter in three multimedia texts. Such scenes are rarely, if ever, subject to book-length analysis, yet such a project can arguably allow race to be understood in new and challenging ways. ...
Tolkien and the Kalevala
1st Edition
By Jyrki Korpua
January 29, 2026
This book explores J. R. R. Tolkien’s unique and warm relationship to the Kalevala, a poem usually hailed as the Finnish and Karelian national epic, compiled, edited and partly revisioned from older folk poetry by Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century. J. R. R. Tolkien, an Oxford ...
Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century
1st Edition
By Yen-Chi Wu
January 23, 2026
Irish Writers and The New Yorker in the Mid-Twentieth Century draws on archival research in the New Yorker records to uncover the contractual details of the first-reading agreement, The New Yorker’s “fat” payments, and Irish writers’ relationships with their editors and peers. The book offers fresh...
Essays on The Glass Menagerie: Truth in the Pleasant Disguise of Illusion
1st Edition
By Tania Chakravertty
December 26, 2025
This volume traces the growth of Tennessee Williams from being a fragile child to becoming one of America’s greatest playwrights, also highlighting the playwright’s deep indebtedness to the Southern literary conventions. The book analyses Williams’s wonderful play with the sense of time and shows ...
Digital Culture and the Hermeneutic Tradition: Suspicion, Trust, and Dialogue
1st Edition
By Inge van de Ven, Lucie Chateau
December 25, 2025
In our information age, deciding what sources and voices to trust is a pressing matter. There seems to be a surplus of both trust and distrust in and on platforms, both of which often amount to having your mindset remain the same. Can we move beyond this dichotomy toward new forms of ...