The goal is to record most books written or edited by the Department of English faculty, instructors, and students. We will start by entering the most recent publications first and work our way back to older books. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found.
With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
If you are a faculty member and have a book you would like to include in the WMU book list, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu/
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Predatory
Glenn Shaheen
WINNER OF THE 2010 AGNES LYNCH STARRETT POETRY PRIZE
“Glenn Shaheen is claiming new ground for American poetry. His poems are about the nightmares of information overload, collapsing infrastructure, ubiquitous violence, and other ills of late empire. The subjects are not happy, but Shaheen's clear vision and crisp-often witty-language offer the pleasures of surprise, discovery, and recognition.” -Ed Ochester
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An Eerdmans Century : 1911-2011
Larry ten Harmsel and Reinder Van Til
From ten-cent specials for Dutch farmers to over 1,000 titles currently in print, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has since 1911 built a solid reputation for producing "the finest in religious literature": an ecumenical blend of thoughtful books by authors including C. S. Lewis, Karl Barth, John Howard Yoder, Philip Yancey, Joan Chittister, N. T. Wright, Rowan Williams, Martin Marty, Eugene Peterson, and Pope Benedict XVI. Now, on the occasion of the Eerdmans centennial celebration, Larry ten Harmsel tells the company's story. Through first-person interviews, historical documents, and newly uncovered information, ten Harmsel relates how Wm. B. Eerdmans Sr. started and built the American publishing company that bears his name -- and how Wm. B. Eerdmans Jr. has carried on the family tradition of independent and eclectic religious publishing into the company's 100th year.
From the publisher, www.eerdmans.com
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A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West
Nicolas Witschi
A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West presents a series of essays that explore the historic and contemporary cultural expressions rooted in America's western states. Offers a comprehensive approach to the wide range of cultural expressions originating in the west. Focuses on the intersections, complexities, and challenges found within and between the different historical and cultural groups that define the west's various distinctive regions Addresses traditionally familiar icons and ideas about the west (such as cowboys, wide-open spaces, and violence) and their intersections with urbanization and other regional complexities Features essays written by many of the leading scholars in western American cultural studies
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Lord of Misrule: A Novel
Jaimy Gordon
"Lord of Misrule" is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong. With her first novel since her acclaimed "Bogeywoman" (1999), Jaimy Gordon bears comparison to other great writers of the American demimonde, such as Nathanael West, Damon Runyon, and Eudora Welty.
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Semi-detached Empire : Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present
Todd Kuchta
In the first book to consider British suburban literature from the vantage point of imperial and postcolonial studies, Todd Kuchta argues that suburban identity is tied to the empire’s rise and fall. He takes his title from the type of home synonymous with suburbia. Like the semi-detached house, which joins separate dwellings under one roof, suburbia and empire were geographically distinct but imaginatively linked. Yet just as the "semi" conceals two homes behind a single façade, suburbia’s apparent uniformity masks its defining oppositions—between country and city, "civilization" and "savagery," master and slave.
While some people saw the suburbs as homegrown colonies, others viewed them as a terra incognita beyond the pale of British culture. Surveying a range of popular and canonical texts, Kuchta reveals the suburban foundations of a variety of unexpected fictional locales: the Thames Valley of H. G. Wells’s Martian attack and the gaslit London of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, but also the tropical backwaters of Joseph Conrad’s Malay Archipelago and the imperial communities of Raj fiction by E. M. Forster and George Orwell. This capacious view demonstrates suburbia's vital role in science fiction, detective tales, condition-of-England novels, modernist narratives of imperial decline, and contemporary multicultural fiction.
Drawing on postcolonial theory, urban studies, and architectural scholarship, this book will appeal to readers interested in Victorian, modern, and contemporary British literature and cultures, especially those concerned with how place shapes class and masculine identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Desription from author's SelectedWorks site http://works.bepress.com/todd_kuchta/1/
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Old Age, Masculinity, and Early Modern Drama: Comic Elders on the Italian and Shakespearean Stage
Anthony Ellis
This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes the physical and behavioral characteristics of the comic old man and situates these traits within early modern society by considering prevailing medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational conflict over political and economic circumstances. The plays examined include Italian dramas by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, Niccolograve; Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti, Lorenzino de' Medici, Andrea Calmo, and Flaminio Scala, and English works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, along with Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood's The Old Law. Besides providing insight into stage representations of aging, this book illuminates how early modern people conceived of and responded to the experience of growing old and its social, economic, and physical challenges.
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Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion
Katherine Joslin
Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion places the iconic New York figure and her writing in the context of fashion history and shows how dress lies at the very center of her thinking about art and culture. The study traces American patronage of the Paris couture houses from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Chanel and places Wharton's characters in these establishments and garments to offer fresh readings of her well-known novels. Less known are Wharton's knowledge of and involvement in the craft of garment making in her tales of seamstresses, milliners, and textile workers, as well as in her creation of workshops in Paris during the First World War to employ Belgian and French seamstresses and promote the value of handmade garments in a world given to machine-driven uniformity of design and labor. Pointing the way toward further research and inquiry, Katherine Joslin has produced a truly interdisciplinary work that combines the best of literary criticism with an infectious love and appreciation of material culture.
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Fred Meijer: Stories of His Life
Bill Smith and Larry Tenharmsel
Retailing Pioneer Fred Meijer comes alive in the pages of this intimate biography, told in part by the people in Fred's life - from store cashiers to American presidents. Astute businessman, visionary arts patron, homespun philosopher - Fred is a man of many parts. His story weaves a chronicle of how to succeed in business, how to shape one's life, how to leave the world a better place, and how to have fun along the way. Book jacket.
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Emily Hamilton and Other Writings
Sukey Vickery and Scott Slawinski
Sukey Vickery’s Emily Hamilton is an epistolary novel dealing with the courtship and marriages of three women. Originally published in 1803, it is one of the earliest examples of realist fiction in America and a departure from other novels at the turn of the nineteenth century. From the outset its author intended it as a realist project, never delving into the overly sentimental plotting or characterization present in much of the writing of Vickery’s contemporaries. Emily Hamilton explores from a decidedly feminine perspective the idea of a woman’s right to choose her own spouse and the importance of female friendship. Vickery’s characterization of women further diverges from the typical eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century didactic of the righteous/sinful woman and depicts, instead, believable female characters exhibiting true-to-life behavior. A presentation of this novel accompanied by Vickery’s poetry, letters, a diary fragment, and a few nineteenth-century responses to her work, Emily Hamilton and Other Writings is the first complete collection of Vickery’s writings.
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Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing
Daneen Wardrop
Daneen Wardrop's Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing begins by identifying and using the dating tools of fashion to place the references to clothing in Dickinson's letters and poems, and to locate her social standing through examining her fashion choices in the iconic daguerreotype. In addition to detailing the poetics of fashion in Dickinson's work, the author argues that close examination of Dickinson and fashion cannot be separated from the changing ways that garments were produced during the nineteenth century, embracing issues of domestic labor, the Lowell textile mills, and the Amherst industry of the Hills Hat Factory located almost next door to Dickinson's Homestead. The recent retrieval of clothing from approximately thirty trunks found in the attic of the Evergreens house, which formerly belonged to Dickinson's brother and sister-in-law, further enhances this remarkable and original interdisciplinary work.
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The Doctoral Degree in English Education
Allen Webb
The Doctoral Degree in English Education gathers the testimonies of graduate students and their professors, mostly former public school language arts teachers, as they develop their abilities as English teachers, earn the most advanced degree in their field, become professional leaders, and begin teaching at the university level. Responding to an on-going national shortage of professors of English education, this book provides first-hand information on deciding to pursue a doctorate, undertaking graduate studies, teaching university methods courses, writing dissertations, and entering the field as a professor of English education. Essential reading for graduate students in English education and for any teacher considering college or university teaching.
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The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England
Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar
Offering a variety of disciplinary perspectives, The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England analyzes the long-overlooked role of gift exchange in literary texts, cultural documents, and economic relations in the period from 1660-1800. Contributors argue that the gift was instrumental to the workings of eighteenth-century society: it supported the phenomenal rise of charities, explained the increasingly complicated trade relations, enforced conventions of obligation and social hierarchies, and both strengthened and challenged the emergence of a market economy. Building upon the works of recent theorists, these essays provide innovative readings of how gift transactions shaped the institutions and practices that gave this era its distinctive identity.
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Literature and the Web: Reading and Responding with New Technologies
Robert Rozema, Allen Webb, and Sara Kajder
What it means to read and write has changed, making this an exhilarating and daunting time to be an English teacher. As teachers, Robert Rozema and Allen Webb understand this and offer a vision of how to teach with emerging tools in ways that amplify student learning. - Sara B. Kajder Author of The Tech-Savvy English Classroom Read the technology book that's about the content, not the computer. Literature and the Web is a thoughtful, nuts-and-bolts guide for any English teacher looking for effective tools to boost readers' engagement and improve their responses to literature. Adolescents love being online: browsing, blogging, socializing. Robert Rozema and Allen Webb show you how to tap into students' understanding and enthusiasm for the Net to find deeper meaning in literary texts. Rozema and Webb's proven strategies harness the power of the Web to:
- guide students into the world of the story
- develop their close reading ability
- scaffold their understanding of a text's social, cultural, and historical contexts
- provide them with authentic opportunities to respond to the text.
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Grammar to Enrich & Enhance Writing
Constance Weaver and Jonathan Bush
Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing is Connie Weaver's latest treasure for grammar instruction that strengthens writing. Born from the ideas and research in her much-loved Teaching Grammar in Context, and benefiting from the creativity of her colleague Jonathan Bush, this new resource goes even further to bring the best research, theory, and practices into the classroom. Grammar to Enrich and Enhance Writing is three helpful books in one. In the first part, Weaver outlines the latest theories, research, and principles that underlie high-quality grammar instruction for writing. She demonstrates that specific, effective grammar-teaching practices:
- address all of the 6 Traits of writing instruction
- emphasize depth, not breadth
- should be positive, productive, and practical-not stodgy, "correct," and limiting
- must be incorporated throughout the writing process, not broken out in isolated units.
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The Art of The One-Act: An Anthology
Arnold Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy
Drama. Edited by Arnold Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy. Includes One-Act plays by Constance Alexander, Claudia Barnett, Gaylord Brewer, Kent R. Brown, Joe Byers, Carey Daniels, Jim Daniels, Lisa Dillman, Christopher Farran, Steve Feffer, Bethany Gauthier, Michael Hemmingson, Michael Hohnstein, Lewis Horton, Richard Keller, Holly Wlater Kerby, Judy Klass, Maryann Lesert, James Magruder, Gloria G. Murray, Rich Orloff, Steven Schutzman, Danny Sklar, Bill Teitelbaum, Troy Tradup, Allison Williams.
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The Years of Smashing Bricks : An Anecdotal Memoir
Richard Katrovas
The Years of Smashing Bricks is about sex, drugs and karate in Coronado and San Diego, California, in the early '70s. It’s a memoir in the form of interlocking stories, and reaches back into Richard Katrovas’s odd childhood on the highways of America with criminal parents, and into his teens in Sasebo, Japan, with adoptive parents on a U.S. Navy base. Having earned a second-degree black belt in Sho-bu-kan Okinawa-te in the late '60s, at the height of the mystique of the black belt, Katrovas gave private karate lessons through his twenties in Coronado and San Diego; at the same time, he lived a bohemian life of sex, drugs, art and ideas. At the heart of this utterly unique, lyrical memoir is a young man’s coming to terms with the cultural fictions of masculinity, and with his divided affections for a dying birth mother with whom he has lost contact, and an adoptive mother who is at once noble, deeply decent, and emotionally abusive.
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Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era
Christopher C. Nagle
Drawing together theoretically informed literary history and the cultural history of sexuality, friendship, and affective relations, this is the first study to trace fully the influence of this notorious yet often undervalued cultural tradition on British Romanticism, a movement that both draws on and resists Sensibility's excessive embodiments of non-normative pleasure. Offering a broad consideration of literary genres while balancing the contributions of both canonical and non-canonical male and female writers, this bold new study insists on the need to revise the traditional boundaries of literary periods and establishes unexpected influences on both Romantic and early Victorian culture and their shared pleasures of attachment.
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Avenue of Vanishing
William Olsen
In lyric and narrative verse, William Olsen explores subcultures ranging from the suburban middle class to the urban drug culture to the art world, and along the way, constantly probes at the very nature of human language. Drawing surprising and illuminating connections between the political and historical, the prosaic and the personal, civilization and nature, these poems try to make sense of the individual’s experience of time, memory, and society. The range of Olsen’s images form an organic connection between the physical and the abstract and his hypnotic mixture of colloquial and eloquent language create a sound and music that are uniquely his own.
That’s what infinity did, contain and threaten,
until friends complied by going one by one
to resurface obligingly in memories, and it sometimes still feels
we left them at our leisure, that such choice was good
so long as a larger choice seemed to succeed it,
nor could gazing bereave us of common sense,
nor would all plenty and foison fall into penury,
nor would shame forever drop its heavy head.
Infinity felt like life, and it said so, and waited.
It even spelled our autumnal names in solid gold
leaves that an inexhaustible supply of wind
tossed for such pleasure as we had said and said
until it transformed into the profound conviction
that the right track was lost—imagine—forever,
it turned our tears into pebbles that can’t seep away,
that can’t fly away, that we don’t dare to pronounce,
yet it seemed concocted out of a clear beautiful sky,
yet it peeped out the woodshed and drank from the gutter spout,
yet it wrestled with itself and sank in eager mud
that presently it might be outwardly known
along with all the other creatures that perish,
heartbreaking idea among many heartbreaking ideas.
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Where Do I Go from Here?: Meeting the Unique Educational Needs of Migrant Students
Karen Vocke
"Where Do I Go From Here?" by Karen Vocke is a practical and well written book that will appeal to teachers, administrators, and other community members where migrant workers live and these workers'' children go to school. The book contains valuable resources, including lesson plans and other materials that could be used by teachers of other ESL children, as well as by teachers whose students are not learners of English. The book helps the reader become aware that educational opportunity and equality do not exist as static entities, but rather are created by whole communities, especially those who choose to make the invisible more visible.
- Prolepsis
In our current society, teachers are faced with students who move frequently from place to place, speak a language other than English, and represent diverse cultures. This book shares many strategies and ideas that will help a teacher, experienced or novice, to meet the needs of these "new" students found in U.S. classrooms.
- Cheryl Boothby State and Federal Programs Director and Special Education Director Hartford, Michigan, Public Schools Migrant farm laborers are often called America''s "invisible people" - a term that, tragically, is just as applicable to their children. Because their lives are transitory and their English skills often limited, our opportunities to have a lasting impact on their literacy education are far too brief. But that makes these children no less deserving of our full commitment. In "Where Do I Go from Here?" Karen Vocke describes how to make the most of each day, creating an educational experience that will serve allchildren long after they leave our classrooms. Always mindful of state standards and assessment requirements, Vocke demonstrates how to modify the curriculum and adapt strategies to facilitate English language acquisition and content-area knowledge. She provides vital information on:
- the history, culture, and families of migrant students so that we better understand - and respect - the foundation on which their lives are built
- essential language considerations, with an emphasis on what we can do now to help struggling English learners become more proficient
- culturally responsive materials and lessons, with guidelines on how to evaluate books, along with a complete lesson plan for promoting cultural sensitivity
- the need for an inclusive community of readers and writers, based on the principles of cooperative learning and supported by a lesson plan on student heritage and tradition as well as other activities that create a culture of sharing
- ways to foster both literacy and cultural understanding through technology, especially the many benefits of digital storytelling, with easy-to-follow guidelines
- the importance of involving migrant families and communities, with suggestions on overcoming language and cultural barriers as well as specific steps you and your school can take.
All this is supported by a wealth of helpful materials, including additional resources for working with migrant families, organizations you can contact for more information, recommended children''s literature and wordless picture books, and letters and announcements to parents in both English and Spanish. Use the ideas in "Where Do I Go from Here?" to create a welcoming learning environment that values inclusion and diversity. Give every student the same chance for a literate life. In the process, you''ll soon see the future of America''s "invisible" students in a bright, new light.
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The Odds of Being
Daneen Leigh Wardrop
Poetry. THE ODDS OF BEING is a new collection of poetry by Daneen Wardrop, a Professor of English at Western Michigan University. "THE ODDS OF BEING is an original; nobody writes like this, and Daneen Wardrop's poems seem to come from a quiet and loving necessity. Among other things, this book is a moving meditation of delight in a new daughter. And as a happy side-effect, reading these poems changes the way your mind hears words, sees landscapes, reflects on history; it is a wonderful flowering."--Jean Valentine
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The Grammar Plan Book: A Guide to Smart Teaching
Constance Weaver
Thanks to Connie Weaver, generations of teachers have come to understand that the most efficient way to teach grammar that's relevant for writing is to embed it within writing instruction. Now her Grammar Plan Book is designed with precisely one thing in mind: to be the best resource you've ever used for teaching grammar to strengthen writing. This new book helps you apply a limited amount of grammar instruction directly to writing and enables you to map out instruction in the way that best serves the needs of your students.
A complete planning tool, The Grammar Plan Book has two complementary parts. Part One describes an overarching framework for high-quality grammar instruction in conjunction with the process of writing. It offers:
- engaging examples of effective teaching
- demonstrations of how that teaching has improved students' use of grammatical options in writing
- suggestions for deciding which editing conventions to teach
- an informal analysis of the grammatical content of typical ACT practice exams.
The Plan Book also contains ideas for encouraging students to make independent use of what they've learned in their own writing and about how to apply grammatical insights to enhance and improve their writing, from adding details to editing appropriately.
Then in Part Two, Weaver presents an exceptional tool for preparing to teach grammar related to improving writing: a minimal grammar handbook for teachers that doubles as a lesson planner. Everything you need to know to teach major grammatical options, stylistic features, and conventions is included:
- basic grammatical functions within the sentence
- grammatical options for adding details and sentence fluency
- connectors (transitions) for organizational flow
- parallelism and other rhetorical devices for emphasis and effect, style, and voice
- stylistic options (dialect versus "standard") for different audiences and purposes
- conventions most important for edited American English
- "rules" that don't necessarily rule effective published writing.
With a designated column for your notes, special lay-flat binding for your convenience, and helpful, comprehensive coverage of important grammatical concepts, The Grammar Plan Book is designed with one thing in mind: to be the best resource you've ever used for teaching grammar to strengthen writing.
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Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations
Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls
Bringing together prominent scholars from a variety of disciplines, Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations offers readers an engaging set of essays on the complicated relationship between discourse and the many institutions within which people act. Each author brings a unique theoretical perspective to conceptualizing how discourse is regulated and how it regulates when human activity is organized for such purposes as work or belonging to a profession. Together, the contributors to this collection offer a provocatively complex picture of what regulation means and the means of regulation. The workplaces or professional sites used as illustrations in these studies are diverse, covering such organizations as an Internet start-up company, an international energy company, an urban hospital, a university, and a telecommunications corporation. The perspectives the contributors bring to their work are likewise diverse, covering a range of prominent thinkers, including Bourdieu, Giddens, Latour, Spivak, Bakhtin, and Burke. In total, the perspectives offered in this volume are invaluable for researchers who want to gain greater insight into routine or regularized discourse and its connections to the many institutions within which people act. Following a general introduction to the idea of regulation and communicative practices, the book is divided into three sections. The first focuses on offering readers an understanding of regulative processes, practices, and effects. The essays in the second section focus on the possibilities for action, addressing the issues of agency, power, and empowerment. The collection concludes with chapters that outline critical research perspectives for examining regulation and communicative practices.
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Selected Studies In Drama and Renaissance Literature
Clifford Davidson
In a distinguished career of teaching, research, editing, and writing, Clifford Davidson has produced an impressive number of publications. For more than thirty years he was an editor of Comparative Drama, the standard journal in the field. He has published widely on medieval and Renaissance drama, with articles and books on topics of vital interest - violence in early plays, the matter of illusion and truth, iconoclasm and iconography, and the stability of symbolic images. With On Tradition; Essays on the Use and Valuation of the Past, he argued that the past "may serve to heal the wound of post-modernity and to make its skepticism seem irrelevant." This collection presents one previously unpublished essay and harvests some of the best of Davidson's shorter writings, published in a wide range of journals and monographs not always readily accessible today. He is now professor emeritus of English and Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, home of the annual International Congress of Medieval Studies, through which Davidson's guiding presence has moved for more than thirty-eight years.
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A Grammar to Waking
Nancy Eimers
Time is the hour at which a pub closes, the moment we must put our pencils down, a way of paying later for something now. A Grammar to Waking explores moments we wake to the grammar of living time, what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being." In the drift of the present, of song in the throat of its bird and the verb in its sentence, the drift of loved one into memory, of talk from the talker to the listener, how and where does meaning live? "There are so many rules we don't even know," writes Nancy Eimers, "but we wake to them anyway." This collection offers a reflective, loving look at the mystery of the time being.
