Focusing on literary-cultural production emerging from or responding to the twentieth century, broadly construed, Twentieth-Century Literature (TCL) offers essays, grounded in a variety of approaches, that interrogate and enrich the ways we understand the literary cultures of the times. This includes work considering how those cultures are bound up with the crucial intellectual, social, aesthetic, political, economic, and environmental developments that have shaped the early twenty-first century as well. TCL also publishes reviews of major studies in the field and awards the annual Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism.

Duke University Press publishes approximately one hundred books per year and thirty journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, though it does also publish two journals of advanced mathematics and a few publications for primarily professional audiences (e.g., in law or medicine). The relative magnitude of the journals program within the Press is unique among American university presses. In recent years, it has developed its strongest reputation in the broad and interdisciplinary area of "theory and history of cultural production," and is known in general as a publisher willing to take chances with nontraditional and interdisciplinary publications, both books and journals.