Routledge Classics
About the Book Series
"Routledge Classics is more than just a collection of texts...it embodies and circulates challenging ideas and keeps vital debates current and alive." – Hilary Mantel
The Routledge Classics series, with titles by Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mary Midgley, was launched in 2001. The series contains the very best of Routledge’s publishing over the past century or so, books that have, by popular consent, become established as classics in their field. Drawing on a fantastic heritage of innovative writing published by Routledge and its associated imprints, this series makes available in attractive, affordable form some of the most important works of modern times.
In 2026 we are delighted to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Routledge Classics series with the publication of seven stellar new titles. All include new prefaces, forewords, introductions or postscripts as well as eye-catching cover designs, a hallmark of the series.
Outside in the Teaching Machine
1st Edition
By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
September 11, 2008
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most pre-eminent postcolonial theorists writing today and a scholar of genuinely global reputation. This collection, first published in 1993, presents some of Spivak’s most engaging essays on works of literature such as Salman Rushdie's controversial ...
Reel to Real: Race, class and sex at the movies
1st Edition
By bell hooks
September 11, 2008
Movies matter – that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks’ classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and ...
The World of Perception
1st Edition
By Maurice Merleau-Ponty
March 12, 2008
'In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of ...
A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful
1st Edition
By Edmund Burke
March 07, 2008
Edited with an introduction and notes by James T. Boulton. 'One of the greatest essays ever written on art.'– The Guardian Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is one of the most important works of aesthetics ever published. Whilst many ...
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature
1st Edition
By William James
March 07, 2008
'Is life worth living? Yes, a thousand times yes when the world still holds such spirits as Professor James.' - Gertrude Stein A classic of American thought, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience is an extraordinary study of human spirituality in all its forms and one of the most ...
Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
1st Edition
By Slavoj Zizek
October 30, 2007
The title is just the first of many startling asides, observations and insights that fill this guide to Hollywood on the Lacanian psychoanalyst’s couch. Zizek introduces the ideas of Jacques Lacan through the medium of American film, taking his examples from over 100 years of cinema, from Charlie ...
The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy
1st Edition
By Peter Winch
October 30, 2007
In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and ...
Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age
1st Edition
By John Gray
August 14, 2007
John Gray is the bestselling author of such books as Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern which brought a mainstream readership to a man who was already one of the UK's most well respected thinkers and political theorists. Gray wrote Enlightenment’s Wake in 1995 – six years after ...
Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference
1st Edition
By Luce Irigaray
February 26, 2007
A passionate celebrator of "sexual difference," Luce Irigaray was never simply after the social equality that her generation so publicly demanded. She was seeking more fundamentally a society that celebrated the differences between the genders and their coming together in a union without hierarchy....
Judgements on History and Historians
1st Edition
By Jacob Burckhardt
February 26, 2007
Western Civilisation was in its pomp when Jacob Burckhardt delivered his Judgements on History and Historians; European Empires spanned the globe, while the modern age was being forged in the nationalist revolutions of 1848. As a tutor to the young Friedrich Nietzsche as well as one of the first ...
Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture
1st Edition
By Stephen Greenblatt
February 26, 2007
Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in ...
Signatures of the Visible
1st Edition
By Fredric Jameson
February 26, 2007
In such celebrated works as Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson has established himself as one of America’s most observant cultural commentators. In Signatures of the Visible, Jameson turns his attention to cinema - the artform that has replaced the novel...