Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies, it engages with topics such as philosophy, science, race, gender, film, music, and ecology. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
The Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary Literature: A Study of Empathy in a Time of Global Crisis
1st Edition
By Tammy Amiel Houser
December 25, 2025
This book examines the relationship between empathy and neoliberalism as it unfolded in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and through the turbulent 2010s. Via close readings of contemporary novels, as well as various non-fictional texts, it traces the changing approaches to empathy in the ...
Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts
1st Edition
By Stefano Ercolino, Massimo Fusillo
December 23, 2025
Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts explores how readers and viewers engage cognitively and affectively with ethically troubling artworks across literature, the visual and performing arts, and screen media. Drawing on aesthetics, cultural history and theory, psychology, and neuroscience, ...
Narrating Multiplicities in Motion: The Transformative Power of Storytelling in Anglophone Cultures
1st Edition
Edited
By Elena Ogliari, Anna Pasolini, Carla Tempestoso
November 09, 2025
Narrating Multiplicities in Motion brings together a dynamic collection of interdisciplinary essays that explore storytelling as a powerful tool for resisting dominant narratives and imagining equitable futures. Grounded in Cultural Studies, English and Anglophone Literature, and Linguistics, the ...
Narratives of Hope and Despair: Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Johanna M. Wagner, Melanie Duckworth, Deanna Benjamin
October 13, 2025
In narratives of literature and cultural production, hope and despair remain fundamental in exploring our world. In recent years, political polarization, the Covid pandemic, global warming, and new and ongoing wars have contributed to global crises, to which despair is an understandable response. ...
Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality
1st Edition
By Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin
September 28, 2025
Reading Digital Fiction offers the first comprehensive and systematic theoretical, methodological, and analytical examination of digital fiction from a cognitive and empirical perspective. Proposing the new concept of “medial reading”, it argues for the centrality of an audience’s interest in, ...
Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue
1st Edition
Edited
By Magda Dragu
September 28, 2025
Subversion and Conformity of Literary Collage: Between Cut and Glue fills a gap in the current scholarship on literary collage, by addressing how different the interpretations of the concept are, depending on the author who uses the concept and the material and writers surveyed. The book studies ...
Yuan Zhen’s New Music Bureau Poetry: Music and Ritual as Means of Governance
1st Edition
By Mei Ah Tan
September 24, 2025
This book is the first comprehensive study of the twelve New Music Bureau poems by the influential poet-official Yuan Zhen 元稹 (779–831) in comparison with the response poems of Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846). Its new perspective on music and ritual reveals connections between Yuan’s poems that otherwise ...
Resistant Reproductions: Pregnancy and Abortion in British Literature and Film
1st Edition
By Fran Bigman
July 30, 2025
Resistant Reproductions asks why narratives of pregnancy and abortion emerged in the early twentieth century and what kinds of stories these narratives conveyed. Is it only once pregnancy becomes plannable that it becomes a story worth telling? Abortion is often considered resistant and feminist, ...
E. M. Forster’s Material Humanism: Queer Matters
1st Edition
By Nour Dakkak
May 05, 2025
Through attending to the nonhuman, E. M. Forster’s Material Humanism: Queer Matters places Forster’s fiction in conversation with contemporary debates concerned with the intersection of neomaterialism, environmental humanities, and queer ecology. The book revisits Forster’s liberal humanism from a ...
Adaptation and Beyond: Hybrid Transtextualities
1st Edition
Edited
By Eva C. Karpinski, Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak
December 18, 2024
This interdisciplinary collection focuses on recent adaptations, both experimental and popular, that put hybridity, transtextuality, and transmediality at play. It reframes adaptation in terms of the transmedia concept of "world-building," which accurately captures the complexity and ...
Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film
1st Edition
Edited
By Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, Miriam Fernández-Santiago
December 18, 2024
Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary and filmic representations of vulnerability depict embodied forms of vulnerability across languages, media, genres, countries, and traditions in the late 20th and ...
The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction
1st Edition
By Stefano Gualeni
December 18, 2024
On a slow autumn afternoon, an atmospheric physicist working at the Malta Weather Station receives a surprising email from a colleague working in the United Kingdom: something troubling has apparently been detected during one of their research flights. The ensuing meteorological mystery is the ...