Routledge Focus on Literature
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 ...
Colonial Philippines in Italian Travel Writing: “Italians” Interpreting Difference
1st Edition
By Jillian Loise Melchor
November 27, 2025
The first comprehensive review of all extant "Italian" chronicles set in the Philippine Islands, this book juxtaposes "Filipino" Otherness with the unique condition of "Italian" ambivalence and alterity within Europe. This book's contribution to the critical studies of travel is the opening of an ...
Dreams in Chinese Fiction: Spiritism, Aestheticism, and Nationalism
1st Edition
By Johannes D. Kaminski
November 27, 2025
This book considers the contemporary political formula of the “Chinese Dream” in the light of the treatment of dreams in Chinese literary history since antiquity. Sinic literary and philosophical texts document an extensive spectrum of dream possibilities: starting with Zhuangzi’s eminent butterfly...
Remapping Energopolitics: Blue Humanities, Geophilosophy and Sri Lankan Minor Writings
1st Edition
By Abhisek Ghosal
November 27, 2025
Emerging concerns and contexts of geological thinking seek to bring out how energopolitical interventions into the geokinetic "unfolding" of the Earth assume new dimensions and directions, owing to the complex and evolving intersections between "folds" and "fluxes" of energy in the context of ...
Creative Writing and the Experiences of Others: Strategies for Outsiders
1st Edition
By Nandita Dinesh
October 26, 2025
In times that are rife with complex manifestations of identity politics, writing classrooms across the world are hosting heated debates about what it means for authors to write about experiences outside their own. This book focuses on writing as the act of witnessing when the writers themselves ...
Emotionality: Heterosexual Love and Emotional Development in Popular Romance
1st Edition
By Eirini Arvanitaki
October 26, 2025
This book focuses on the projections of romantic love and its progression in a selection of popular romance novels and identifies an innovation within the genre’s formula and structure. Taking into account Giddens’s notion of ‘confluent’ love, this book argues that two forms of love exist within ...
Theorising Oliver Jeffers’ Picturebooks: From How to Catch a Star to Now
1st Edition
By Jade Dillon-Craig
October 15, 2025
Theorising Oliver Jeffers’ Picturebooks: From How to Catch a Star to Now examines semiotic, affective and metafictive storytelling in Oliver Jeffers’ postmodern picturebooks from a multi-theoretical approach. This volume provides fresh insight into Jeffers’ iconotextual narratives through...
Toxic Masculinity on the London Stage, 1600–1610
1st Edition
By Anthony Archdeacon
June 30, 2025
The idea of toxic masculinity might feel like a very modern, even twenty-first century notion, but similar concerns about male behaviour, also often characterised in terms of poisons and poisoning, can be identified in the literature of 400 hundred years ago, not only in Shakespeare’s Othello ...
The Global Distribution of Popular Narrative in the Nineteenth Century: Forms of Circulation and Circulation of Forms
1st Edition
Edited
By Graham Law
May 28, 2025
The principal aim of this collection of articles is to explore the evolving generic patterns and the modes of transnational distribution of popular narrative over the course of the nineteenth century. This volume addresses networks of reception drawn around cities as diverse as Constantinople, ...