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.
Bastard Literature: Rethinking Afrikaans Literary History in the Contact Zone
1st Edition
By Willie Burger
March 22, 2027
Bastard Literature: Rethinking Afrikaans Literary History in the Contact Zone offers a new history of Afrikaans literature, tracing its development from the colonial contact zone to the digital age. Rather than presenting a unified national tradition, it explores a literature formed through ...
Hybridity, Identity, and Belonging in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi and Choman Hardi: Writing Home
1st Edition
By James Davey
December 28, 2026
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 ...
Post-Monolingual Anglophone Novels: Writing Beyond English
1st Edition
By Birgit Neumann
December 28, 2026
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 ...
Contemporary Literary Studies and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Comparative Frameworks for a Globalised Cultural Field
1st Edition
Edited
By Rafał Pokrywka, Haimo Stiemer
December 16, 2026
How can we theoretically grasp the rapidly transforming world of the 21st century? What frameworks allow us to understand global cultural dynamics, digital disruptions, and shifting social orders analytically? Contemporary Literary Studies and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Comparative Frameworks for a ...
Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor
1st Edition
By Michał Kisiel
November 24, 2026
Cluttered Universes of Samuel Beckett and Tadeusz Kantor is a collection of four essays bringing Kantor’s and Beckett’s texts, theatres, and theories into conversation with deconstruction, new materialism, environmental humanities, and posthumanism. This book is dedicated to two artists rarely ...
The Politics of Space and Identity in Middle Eastern-Australian Writing: Cartographies of Belonging
1st Edition
By Mohsen Hanif
November 08, 2026
What does it mean to belong when the ground beneath you is racially coded and mapped by another’s power? The Politics of Space and Identity in Middle Eastern-Australian Writing: Cartographies of Belonging takes this question to Middle Eastern-Australian writing and discovers that space is never ...
Breathing Underwater: The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature
1st Edition
By Vladimir Biti
September 27, 2026
Breathing Underwater: The Complicity of the Defaced in Post-Multinational Literature offers an intervention in contemporary world literature studies by introducing the post-multinational condition as a dynamic and polyvalent platform for literature's worlding. Moving beyond conventional frameworks,...
The Crisis of Liberal Democracy in Contemporary Novels: or The Continuation of History
1st Edition
By Leander Møller Gøttcke
July 19, 2026
This book explores how contemporary novels reflect a profound shift in Western culture, from the political optimism of the post-Cold War era to growing fears about the future of liberal democracy. Analysing four major works – Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle series, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, ...
Transnational African Identities in Contemporary Urban Fiction: Community, Hospitality and Friendship
1st Edition
By Fatma Akçay
July 19, 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 ...