Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Transnational African Identities in Contemporary Urban Fiction: Community, Hospitality and Friendship
1st Edition
By Fatma Akçay
July 20, 2026
Transnational African Identities in Contemporary Urban Fiction: Community, Hospitality and Friendship offers a sophisticated and original lens for understanding transnational African identities and their experiences of community, hospitality, and friendship in contemporary urban fiction. Focusing ...
A Comparative Reading of Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism: Come Back Babar
1st Edition
By Andrew Nyongesa, John Mugubi
May 21, 2026
This book is response to the recent surge of formidable voices that consistently demean and attempt to reverse the gains of pan-Africanism. Besides questioning its relevance, these voices supplant essential tenets of pan-Africanism – Blackness, the narrative of Return, sanctity of the ancestral ...
Modern Indian Literature as Cosmopolis: Conversations with Hanuman
1st Edition
By Didier Coste
May 21, 2026
This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. It shows how, since the mid-19th century, Indian literary modernity pursued the conjunction of the ...
Perpetrators’ Legacies: Post-imperial Condition in Sebald and McEwan
1st Edition
By Vladimir Biti
May 21, 2026
The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who enmeshed in the hierarchies of power inherited from their imperial times, strive to disentangle themselves from that burdensome legacy. To achieve this, they undertake a subtle detachment from the ...
Failure Narratives Beyond Redemption: Twentieth Century Literature and Film
1st Edition
By Krzysztof Rowiński
April 22, 2026
The book focuses on the concept of non- redemptive failure, a type of failure that is not part of a larger narrative of success or narrative redemption, with attention to how the concept functions between literature, critical theory, and other fields. Examining literature and film from mid- ...
The Bildungsroman: Re-birth, Travels, and Conversations Across the Mediterranean, Irish, and Red Seas
1st Edition
By Leen Bou Nassereddine
April 05, 2026
The book The Bildungsroman: Re-birth, Travels, and Conversations Across the Mediterranean, Irish, and Red Seas aims to explore the history and evolution of the bildungsroman genre by moving beyond its traditional Eurocentric foundations, often associated with Goethe as the archetype of the genre. ...
Convergence of East-West Poetics: Williams’s Negotiation with the Chinese Landscape Tradition
1st Edition
By Zhanghui Yang
December 25, 2025
The present book examines William Carlos Williams’s negotiation with cultural modes and systems of the Chinese landscape tradition in his landscape writing. Focusing on Walliams’s landscape modes of landscape with(out) infused emotions, the book builds a linkage between their interactions with...
A Marxist Perspective on Select Fiction by Indian Writers from the Gulf: Narratives of the ‘Permanently Temporary’ Migrants
1st Edition
By Tasnima Yasmin
November 24, 2025
This book offers a critical lens to examine the socio-economic struggles and class dynamics of South Asian diasporic characters in Indian writing from the Gulf. It highlights how South Asian migrant characters remain hanging in a limbo in the exploitative neo-liberal capitalist structures of the ...
Hybridity, Identity, and Belonging in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi: Writing Home
1st Edition
By James Davey
October 23, 2025
Hybridity, Identity, and Belonging in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi: Writing Home explores how contemporary British poets navigate the complex and often contested concept of ‘home’. Focusing on the works of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi, as well as other contemporary poets, this book ...
Epiphanies in the Modernist Short Story: Italian and English Perspectives
1st Edition
By Valeria Taddei
September 28, 2025
The poetics of epiphany have long been recognised as a broad aesthetic trend of modernism, related to the power of art to reveal the hidden essence of reality. Yet the critical use of the concept is still contested, complicated by the fact that in many modernist works exceptional moments are ...
The Literary Beach: History and Aesthetics of a Modern Topos
1st Edition
Edited
By Carsten Meiner, Katrine Helene Andersen
September 28, 2025
As a geo-historical place, the beach integrates a variety of characteristics and functions so multiple that they tend to contradict each other. The beach is both a place of work and trade but also of leisure; it is both a place of therapy and health but also of migration, war, and death; it is a ...
Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novels: Writing Beyond English
1st Edition
By Birgit Neumann
September 18, 2025
Engaging with recent research in literary multilingualism studies, the global anglophone and comparative studies, this book theorizes the so-called post-monolingual anglophone novels. Inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012), post-monolingual ...