Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics in American Literature and Culture.
From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-Garde Aesthetics
1st Edition
By Amrita Sharma
May 12, 2026
From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-Garde Aesthetics offers a comprehensive account of Language Poetry, tracing its origins, evolution, and enduring influence. It demonstrates how a movement that emerged from American experimental writing in the ...
Don DeLillo and the Visual
1st Edition
By Brian Jarvis
January 28, 2026
Over the course of a prodigious literary career which now spans seven decades, DeLillo has engaged with the problem and the promise of vision. Don DeLillo and the Visual offers a fresh perspective on the lead writer for the Age of the Image. Whilst the author is sometimes characterised and even ...
Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace
1st Edition
By Heather Ostman
December 31, 2025
Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Religion, and the Search for Grace explores selected texts by four major American authors: Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sojourner Truth, and Kate Chopin. This monograph presents a nuanced analysis of the relationship between these authors and religion. ...
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty
1st Edition
By George H. Jensen, Heidi Skurat Harris
December 26, 2025
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty is the first book-length study of Norman Maclean or any of his works. Since the publication of “A River Runs through It” in 1976, readers and critics have considered it to be one of the most carefully crafted stories in American ...
Postmodernism, Twenty-First Century Culture, and American Fiction: Establishing the Continuum
1st Edition
By Matt Graham
December 25, 2025
Postmodernism’s ‘end’ is a complex and contentious topic. Yet, one overarching consensus emerges: the postmodern has been surpassed. This book poses a thought experiment challenging this position – what if postmodernism persists within the twenty-first century? Rather than designate a new epoch or ...
Texting the Nation: Agencies and Actions in the Declaration of Independence
1st Edition
By Michael Ditmore
November 11, 2025
Texting the Nation closely parses the Declaration of Independence’s text and logical argument in grammatical and rhetorical terms to highlight patterns of agency, from the passive voice construction and rearranged parallel arrangement of political principles to the composition history and meaning ...
The Emergence of American Occidentalism in Literature and Culture: The Disguised Identity
1st Edition
By Muthanna Al-Janabi
October 27, 2025
The book presents an innovative conceptualization of Western thought, casting the discourse of black and white intellectuals and politicians as a treatise on Occidentalism. It envisions American Occidentalism as an inner discourse where Critical Occidentalists interact textually and historically in...
Unveiling Structures in Colson Whitehead’s Fiction
1st Edition
By Paula Martín-Salván
October 02, 2025
This book offers a comprehensive critical analysis of Colson Whitehead’s fiction, positioning him as a key figure in both African American literature and the global “turn to genre”. It explores how Whitehead employs conventions from popular genres—such as detective, zombie and caper stories—not ...
The Rise of Sensationalism in American Literature and Culture: 1620-1860
1st Edition
By Alexander Moudrov
September 04, 2025
The Rise of Sensationalism in American Literature and Culture: 1620‑1860 argues that the rise of the American tradition of sensationalism can be better understood in the transatlantic context. Early American writers were unquestionably influenced by various forms of European sensationalism. At the ...
Unhappy Beginnings: Narratives of Precarity, Failure, and Resistance in North American Texts
1st Edition
Edited
By Isabel González-Díaz, Fabián Orán-Llarena
May 05, 2025
This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured...
Representations of Technoculture in Don DeLillo’s Novels
1st Edition
By Laila Sougri
December 18, 2024
This book is the first to explore technoculture in all of Don DeLillo’s novels. From Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020), the American author anatomizes the constantly changing relationship between culture and technology in overt and layered aspects of the characters’ experiences. Through a ...
The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, and Iconic Authorship
1st Edition
By James L. Machor
October 07, 2024
Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In ...