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.
Asian American War Stories: Trauma and Healing in Contemporary Asian American Literature
1st Edition
By Jeffrey Tyler Gibbons
May 27, 2024
Asian American War Stories examines contemporary Asian American literature that considers both the short-term and the long-term effects of war, trauma, and displacement on civilians, as well as the ways that individuals seek healing in the face of suffering. Through the works of contemporary ...
Authoritarianism and Class in American Political Fiction: Elite Pluralism and Political Bosses in Three Post-War Novels
1st Edition
By David Smit
January 29, 2024
This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense ...
Death, Time and Mortality in the Later Novels of Don DeLillo
1st Edition
By Philipp Wolf
January 29, 2024
This book offers the first systematic study of death in the later novels of Don DeLillo. It focuses on Underworld to The Silence, along with his 1984 novel White Noise, in which the fear of death dominates the protagonists most hauntingly. The study covers eight novels, which mark the development ...
Lynd Ward’s Wordless Novels, 1929-1937: Visual Narrative, Cultural Politics, Homoeroticism
1st Edition
By Grant F. Scott
January 29, 2024
This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an ...
Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic: A Study in Form, History, and Culture
1st Edition
By Wanlin Li
September 25, 2023
As part of a larger attempt to understand the dynamic interactions between gothic form and ideology, this volume focuses on a strong formal feature of the American gothic, "global ambiguity," and examines the important cultural work it performs in the nineteenth-century history of the genre. ...
Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster, Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits: The Other America
1st Edition
By Adriano Tedde
September 25, 2023
This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic ...
Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place
1st Edition
By Alice Sundman
September 25, 2023
How does Toni Morrison create and form her literary places? As one of the first studies exploring Morrison’s archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author’s textual choices, her ...
Alzheimer’s Disease in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Memory Lost
1st Edition
By Cristina Garrigós
May 31, 2023
This volume seeks to bring readers to a deeper understanding of contemporary cultural and social configurations of Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing 21st-century U.S. novels in which the disease plays a key narrative role. Via analysis of selected works, Garrigós considers how the erasure of ...
Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays: Radical Contemplative
1st Edition
By Mark Fulk
May 31, 2023
Interpreting Susan Sontag’s Essays: Radical Contemplative offers its readers a scholarly examination of her essays within the context of philosophy and aesthetic theory. This study sets up a dialogue between her works and their philosophical counterparts in France and Germany, including the works ...
Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral
1st Edition
By Joelle Mann
May 31, 2023
Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature,...
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven
1st Edition
Edited
By Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Emily Hamilton-Honey
May 31, 2023
This collection analyzes the theme of the "afterlife" as it animated nineteenth-century American women’s theology-making and appeals for social justice. Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine...
Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s "Beloved": The Case for Reparations
1st Edition
By Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem
May 31, 2023
Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as ...