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.
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 ...
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 ...
Xueqin and Xakespeare: Reading The Story of the Stone through Hamlet
1st Edition
By Judith Forsyth
July 30, 2025
This monograph offers a detailed consideration of the five-volume novel written by Cao Xueqin and translated into English as The Story of the Stone, when read through William Shakespeare’s drama Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, A Tragedy in Five Acts. The book builds on the superlative David Hawkes/John ...
Bengal and Italy: Transcultural Encounters from the Mid-19th to the Early 21st Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Paromita Chakravarti, Mario Prayer
November 28, 2024
The ten chapters collected in this book manifest the current global interest in trans-border dialogues and trace the origins and development of Italian and Bengali internationalisms in the period from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. Despite having differing political statuses and lacking a ...
Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims
1st Edition
By Epsita Halder
October 09, 2024
Analysing an extensive range of texts and publications across multiple genres, formats and literary lineages, Reclaiming Karbala studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of the tenets of the...
A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature: Against Origins and Destinations
1st Edition
By Didier Coste
August 26, 2024
This cross-disciplinary approach to literary reading of any provenance based on an “experimental cosmopolitan” epistemology de- and recontextualizes the texts from the points of view of multiple cultures and historical moments, enriching interpretation and aesthetic experience beyond the ...
The Myth and Identity of the Romantic Artist in European Literature: A Self-Constructed Fantasy
1st Edition
By Elena Anastasaki
May 27, 2024
This study addresses the question of artistic identity and the myth of the artist as it has been shaped by the artists themselves. While the term artist is to be understood in a broad sense, the focus of this study is the literature of the Romantic tradition. Identity is largely perceived as a ...
Women Writing Trauma in the Global South: A Study of Aminatta Forna, Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy
1st Edition
By Annemarie Pabel
May 27, 2024
Through exploring complex suffering in the writings of Aminatta Forna, Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy, Women Writing Trauma in the Global South dismantles conceptual shortcomings and problematic imbalances at the core of existing theorizations around psychological trauma. The global constellation ...