"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 2021 we are delighted to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Routledge Classics series with the publication of fifteen stellar new titles. All include new forewords or introductions and eye-catching cover designs, a hallmark of the series.
By Judith Butler
May 13, 2011
In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of...
By Bernard Williams
May 19, 2015
With a new foreword by Jonathan Lear 'Remarkably lively and enjoyable…It is a very rich book, containing excellent descriptions of a variety of moral theories, and innumerable and often witty observations on topics encountered on the way.' - Times Literary Supplement Bernard Williams was one of ...
By Jack Zipes
October 12, 2011
The fairy tale is arguably one of the most important cultural and social influences on children's lives. But until the first publication of Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, little attention had been paid to the ways in which the writers and collectors of tales used traditional forms and ...
By Stanley Cohen
May 17, 2011
'Richly documented and convincingly presented' -- New Society Mods and Rockers, skinheads, video nasties, designer drugs, bogus asylum seeks and hoodies. Every era has its own moral panics. It was Stanley Cohen’s classic account, first published in the early 1970s and regularly revised, that ...
By Judith Butler
May 12, 2006
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning ...
By Ernest Nagel, James R. Newman
May 19, 2015
'Nagel and Newman accomplish the wondrous task of clarifying the argumentative outline of Kurt Godel's celebrated logic bomb.' – The Guardian In 1931 the mathematical logician Kurt Godel published a revolutionary paper that challenged certain basic assumptions underpinning mathematics and logic. A...
By H.D.F. Kitto
April 28, 2011
Why did Aeschylus characterize differently from Sophocles? Why did Sophocles introduce the third actor? Why did Euripides not make better plots? So asks H.D.F Kitto in his acclaimed study of Greek tragedy, available for the first time in Routledge Classics. Kitto argues that in spite of dealing ...
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....
By Rosa Luxemburg
April 11, 2003
Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist who fought and died for her beliefs. In January 1919, after being arrested for her involvement in a workers' uprising in Berlin, she was brutally murdered by a group of right-wing soldiers. Her body was recovered days later from a canal. Six years ...
By Jean Aitchison
April 27, 2011
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by the author. ‘An excellent and very welcome guide to psycholinguistics…highly recommended.’ The Washington Post A classic in its field for almost forty years, The Articulate Mammal is a brilliant introduction to psycholinguistics. In lucid...
By Jacques Lacan
May 19, 2015
A charismatic and controversial figure, Lacan is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century and his work has revolutionized linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural and media studies. He gained his reputation as a lecturer, disseminating his ideas to audiences that...
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 ...