Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
Melville’s (Dis)Orders: Four Transatlantic Dialogues on Essence, Existence, and the Truth of Things
1st Edition
By Paweł Jędrzejko, John Matteson
September 21, 2026
Melville’s (Dis)Orders offers a dialogical re-reading of Herman Melville as a thinker of moral, political, and existential disorder, tracing how his literary imagination confronts authority, law, violence, and ethical responsibility in modernity. Combining literary analysis with philosophical ...
Beauty in the Western Canon
1st Edition
By Alberto Castelli
August 31, 2026
Dadaist works, such as Duchamp’s ready mades, famously challenge the connection between art and the aesthetic by presenting objects of little or no aesthetic interest, such as urinals, snow shovels, and bicycles, as art. From impressionist paintings to unmade beds exhibited in galleries, this ...
Decentering the Nineteenth Century Novel: Literature and Psychology
1st Edition
By Alberto Castelli
August 31, 2026
This groundbreaking monograph offers readers a profound exploration of nineteenth-century literature. Rather than presenting these works as a mere succession of literary movements, the author weaves romanticism, realism, gothic, and decadence into a coherent tapestry united by a singular focus: the...
Dickens from Shakespeare, Fuseli and Blake: Imagination and Jealousy in Art and Literature
1st Edition
By Jeremy Tambling
August 11, 2026
Dickens says he concentrates on 'the romantic side of familiar things', and so highlights the visionary, non-realist, uncanny nature of his writing. This book delves into the sources of that through Shakespeare, and Fuseli, the great artist who imagined scenes from Shakespeare and who created the '...
Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Petitioning Women
1st Edition
By Amy Dunham Strand
May 22, 2026
Political Prayer in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how American women writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Emily Dickinson translated petitioning – a political form for redress of grievances with religious resonance, or ...
Reading the Romantic Ridiculous
1st Edition
By Andrew McInnes, Rita J. Dashwood
May 22, 2026
Reading The Romantic Ridiculous aims to take Romantic Studies from the sublime to the ridiculous. Building on recent work that decentres the myth of the solitary genius, this duograph theorises the ridiculous as an alternative affect to the sublime, privileging collective laughter above solitude ...
Capital as Literature: Marx Against Himself
1st Edition
By Perry Meisel
April 24, 2026
Studies of Marx, particularly of his masterwork Capital (1867), are as a rule tutelary—they attempt to explain him. Even literary readers of Marx, from Raymond Williams to Fredric Jameson, seek to secure Marxist tenets by means of Marxian style. ‘Capital’ as Literature: Marx Against Himself departs...
The Rossetti Legacy: Victorian Poetry, Pre-Raphaelite Art, and the Exploration of Self-Identity
1st Edition
By Charlotte Xiaoqian Cai
April 17, 2026
This groundbreaking study reveals how the Rossetti siblings revolutionized Victorian conceptions of selfhood through a sophisticated dialectic that transcends conventional binaries – matter and spirit, sacred and secular love, strength and vulnerability, divinity and depravity. While their ...
Victorian Humor: A History, a Narrative Theory, and the Experience of Reading
1st Edition
By Glynnis Cox
March 20, 2026
Humor and the novel both belong, in important ways, to the nineteenth century. It is in the nineteenth century that we saw an unprecedented outpouring of novels and short stories, and it was also in the nineteenth century when humor emerged as the dominant term through which the comic was described...
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Life Writing, and the Victorian Nomad
1st Edition
By Jean Fernandez
February 24, 2026
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Life Writing, and the Victorian Nomad employs canonical literary texts, and introduces new noncanonical works of fiction and autobiography, to uncover how nineteenth-century fiction and life writing engaged with the figure of the nomad as a problematic phenomenon during ...
Victorian Women’s Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze: Narrating Commerce, Craftsmanship, and Nationhood in the Middle East and Asia
1st Edition
By Margaret K. Gray
January 30, 2026
Victorian Women’s Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze argues that female travellers both informed and expanded upon Victorian debates surrounding the role of art, and art production, as a nexus of political-economic progress and cultural identity. The book focuses on reading Victorian ...
Fyodor Dostoevsky: When Beauty Saves the World
1st Edition
By Alberto Castelli
January 21, 2026
This volume offers a philosophical and literary exploration of Dostoevsky’s humanism, with a particular focus on his ethical and aesthetic reflections on human nature. Rather than approaching Dostoevsky through the lens of national character or the so-called Russian spirit, this book engages in a ...