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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Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes
Alison Swan
The women writers in this quietly elegant collection share their thoughts and feelings on the Great Lakes region, one neglected in nature writing, with sublime intelligence. Whether they are relative newcomers to the area or longtime residents, their wonder and deep appreciation for all the lakes have to offer is evident in each essay. The lakes themselves are of paramount importance to these writers, and this focus on their subject and not themselves keeps the anthology firmly grounded as nature writing at its very best. Sharon Dilworth remembers mysterious recurring losses at Lake Superior; Leslie Stainton traces the history of place through a point on Lake Erie in her erudite and elegant discussion; and Sue William Silverman, an ocean lover, finds Lake Michigan revelatory. Separately the essays are delightful, intimate, and surprising, and collectively they prove to be compulsively readable. A class act from start to finish.--"Mondor, Colleen" Copyright 2007 Booklist
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Love's Pilgrimage: The Holy Journey in English Renaissance Literature
Grace Tiffany
In Love's Pilgrimage, Grace Tiffany explores literary adaptations of the Catholic pilgrimage in the Protestant poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, and John Bunyan. Her discussion of these authors' works illuminates her larger claim that while in the sixteenth century conventional pilgrimages to saints' shrines disappeared - as did shrines themselves - from English life, the imaginative importance of the pilgrimage persisted, and manifested itself in various ways in English culture.
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Alonzo "Old Block" Delano
Nicolas S. Witschi
Biography and criticism of California Gold Rush writer Alonzo Delano (1806-1874), whose works include an Oregon Trail narrative, humorous sketches, and periodical contributions.
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Hermine: An Animal Life
Maria Beig and Jaimy Gordon
Fiction. Translation. "Marie Beig's HERMINE is a heartbreaking bestiary, a human life told in sixty-four animals. The book's design is apt, since its protagonist elicits less regard from her farm family than its animals do. Imagine a world in which your first memories are of your 'father's bad-tempered scowl and the angry faces of sisters and brothers who were struck and struck back.' A world in which tenderness is 'always turning away again to someone else' -- -Jim Shepard. Translated from the German by Jaimy Gordon.
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The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975
Charles Rezinkoff and Seamus Cooney
Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), the son of Russian garment workers, was an American original: a blood-and-bone New Yorker, a collector of images and stories who walked the city from the Bronx to the Battery and breathed the soul of the Jewish immigrant experience into a lifetime of poetry. He wrote personal memoirs, family history, and tenement tales in verse. He wrote narrative poems based on Old Testament sources. Above all, he wrote spare, intensely visual, epigrammatic poems, a kind of urban haiku. The language of these short poems is as plain as bread and salt, their imagery as crisp and unambiguous as a Charles Sheeler photograph. But their meaning is only hinted at: it is there in the selection of details, and in the music of the verse. Reznikoff was sincere and objective, a poet of great feeling who strove to honor the world by describing it precisely. He also strove to keep his feelings out of his poetry. He did not confess, he did not pose, he did not cultivate a myth of himself. Instead he created art-an unadorned art in praise of the world that God and men have made-and invited readers to bring their own feelings to it. In an age of ephemera, of first drafts rushed into print and soon forgotten, Reznikoff's poetry is a sturdy, well-wrought thing-"a girder, still itself / among the rubble." A timeless testament-impersonal, incorruptible, undeniably American-it will survive every change in literary fashion. Book jacket.
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Validating Bachelorhood
Scott Slawinski
This book explores images of single and married men in C.B. Brown's Monthly Magazine and concludes that Brown used his periodical as a vehicle for validating bachelorhood as a viable alternative form of masculinity.
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The Turquoise Ring
Grace Tiffany
Acclaimed novelist Grace Tiffany revisits Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and offers a radical new interpretation of the famous character, Shylock. In 1568, 21-year-old Shiloh ben Gozan flees the Spanish Inquisition to live openly as a Jew in Venice and brings with him a turquoise ring. In Venice, as this ring is lost, stolen, traded and found again, it shapes not just Shiloh's life, but also that of his great enemy and business rival. 'A passionate and evocative take on the Shylock story.' - Joel Gross
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Streets in their own ink
Stuart Dybek
"In his second book of poems, Stuart Dybek finds extraordinary vitality in the same vibrant imagery that animates his celebrated works of fiction. A brilliant and deft enactment of place, these poems map the internal geographies of characters who inhabit severe and often savage city streets, finding there a tension that transfigures past and present, memory and fantasy, sin and sanctity, nostalgia and the need to forget. Full of music and ecstasy, the poems of Streets in Their Own Ink consecrate a shadowed, alternate city of dreams and retrospection that parallels a modern city of hard realities. Throughout, one finds poetry enlivened by Dybek's signature talent for translating ""extreme and fantastic events into a fabulous dailiness, as though the extraordinary were everywhere around us if only someone would tell us where to look"" (Geoffrey Wolff)."
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Jane Addams : a writer's life
Katherine Joslin
Jane Addams, a Writer's Life is an expansive, revealing, and refreshing re-examination of the renowned reformer as an imaginative writer. Jane Addams is best known for her groundbreaking social work at Hull-House, the force of her efforts toward Progressive political and social reform, and the bravery of her commitment to pacifism, for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize. Here, Joslin moves beyond this history to present Addams as a literary figure. Katherine Joslin examines Addams's rejection of scholarly writing in favor of a synthesis of fictional and analytical prose that appealed to a wider audience. From there, Joslin traces Addams's style from her early works, Philanthropy and Social Progress and Hull House Maps and Papers , influenced by Florence Kelley, to her modernist and experimental last books, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House and My Friend, Julia Lathrop , placing Addams in the context of other Chicago writers including Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Monroe, Frank Norris and James T. Farrell. Joslin's close readings showcase Addams's distinguishing literary devices, such as using stories about people rather than sociological argument to make moral points. Addams explained her method of argument by illustration, stating that "ideas only operate upon the popular mind through will and character, and must be dramatized before they reach the mass of men." As Joslin pursues the argument that Addams's power as a public figure stemmed from the success of her books and essays, Addams herself emerges as a literary woman.
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Prague Winter
Richard Katrovas
Prague's Velvet Revolution changed Richard Katrovas's life and values profoundly, and Prague Winter reflects those changes. Katrovas bears witness to the remarkable transformation of one of the world's great cities, laying bare his life not in the spirit of confession so much as in solidarity with all who dare to change. Prague Winter chronicles and signs one American's view of Central Europe's metamorphosis, and how that perspective redirected his journey through midlife.
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Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech
Lisa Cohen Minnick
Applies linguistics methods for a richer understanding of literary texts and spoken language. Dialect and Dichotomy outlines the history of dialect writing in English and its influence on linguistic variation. It also surveys American dialect writing and its relationship to literary, linguistic, political, and cultural trends, with emphasis on African American voices in literature. Furthermore, this book introduces and critiques canonical works in literary dialect analysis and covers recent, innovative applications of linguistic analysis of literature. Next, it proposes theoretical principles and specific methods that can be implemented in order to analyze literary dialect for either linguistic or literary purposes, or both. Finally, the proposed methods are applied in four original analyses of African American speech as represented in major works of fiction of the American South--Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman , William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury , and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God . Dialect and Dichotomy is designed to be accessible to audiences with a variety of linguistic and literary backgrounds. It is an ideal research resource and course text for students and scholars interested in areas including American, African American, and southern literature and culture; linguistic applications to literature; language in the African American community; ethnicity and representation; literary dialect analysis and/or computational linguistics; dialect writing as genre; and American English.
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Osprey Island
Thisbe Nissen
From the author ofThe Good People of New York ("Fabulous . . . Wonderfully satisfying . . . This is a voice I'd follow anywhere" --Elinor Lipman), a book about summer, that most incandescent and evanescent season -- about lazy days, fleeting love, and tempers that flare in the heat. Very few people ever leave the tight-knit community of year-rounders on Osprey Island, and fewer yet come back. Suzy Chizek does, though, with her young daughter in tow; a single mother, she comes home in the summer of 1988 to help her father run his hotel, the Lodge. Roddy Jacobs returns to work at the Lodge, too, after a mysterious period of drifting in the wake of the Vietnam War. Separated since high school, Suzy and Roddy cannot help but come together, unsure whether they are in love or simply using each other, and the Island, as an escape from the pressures and disappointments of mainland life. Just before the start of the season, the Lodge's troubled housekeeper dies in a suspicious fire, shattering the Island's equilibrium. Lorna had protected her young son, affectionately nicknamed Squee, from the rages of her alcoholic husband, Lance. When Squee, in his grief and panic, runs away from both his father's ramshackle home and his grandparents, he seeks out Roddy and Suzy, whom he implicitly trusts, bringing the tentative lovers into conflict with volatile Lance. Roddy's mother, the controversial and independent Eden, seems to know more Island secrets than anyone. She loves Squee with motherly intensity, but her righteous defense of him may prove more dangerous than helpful. Can the community save Squee from his father, the very person who is meant to take care of him? Can a town that is fueled by secrets expose itself to responsibility? Is it brave or foolish to leave the familiarity of Osprey Island? In the uniquely ephemeral atmosphere of a summer resort, Thisbe Nissen unfolds an ever-deepening story of ancient loyalties and betrayals, while showcasing the qualities that readers have come to expect from her: exuberant wit, fierce intelligence, and unforgettable warmth and compassion. An ambitious, richly satisfying novel of indelible power and beauty.
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Will
Grace Tiffany
Will Shakespeare has left Stratford for London and pitched himself headlong into the chaotic, perilous world of the theater. Through raw will-and an amazing gift for words- he raises himself from poor player to master playwright. But as his success earns him great pleasure and adoration from others, it also draws the jealous wrath of Christopher Marlowe, a baby-faced genius whose anger is as punishing as his poetry is sweet... From the pen of Grace Tiffany, a Renaissance scholar and Shakespeare historian, leaps a wild, vivid tale that brings Will Shakespeare to life.
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Homo Narrans : the poetics and anthropology of oral literature
Richard Utz and Zygmunt Mazur
Explores how human beings shape their world through the stories they tell. This book ponders over the nature of the storytelling impulse, the social function of narrative, and the role of individual talent in oral tradition. It also claims that the need to tell stories is what distinguishes humans from all other living creatures.
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"But Will It Work With Real Students?": Scenarios for Teaching Secondary English Language Arts
Janet Alsup and Jonathan Bush
Pedagogical narratives written by secondary teachers and thoughtful responses to these narratives by experienced teachers and teacher educators form the heart of this text. Alsup and Bush also include concise summaries of related theory and research and controversies in the field, through annotated bibliographies for continued reading, discussion questions, and suggested learning activities for preservice teachers. Beginning with narratives about teaching literature, writing, language/grammar, second language learners in the English classroom, management, discipline, technology, and standardized testing, the authors contextualize these stories within the larger discipline of secondary English language arts teaching and provide a framework for teacher professional identity development by prompting continued thinking about curricular choices, teaching philosophies, and personal pedagogies. Alsup and Bush include a final chapter describing how a secondary English teacher can use narrative action research in his or her class to become a critically reflective practitioner.
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Here I stand : a musical history of African Americans in Battle Creek, Michigan
Sonya Bernard-Hollins and Sean Hollins
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Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life
Sharon Bryan and William Olsen
"The tone may vary from one essay to another, but more than anything else, these are love stories, not rose-colored romances, but love that includes doubt, violence, wrestling with angels, and devils."—From the Introduction
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Little Low Heaven
Anthony Butts
Poetry. LITTLE LOW HEAVEN describes a world of isolation and beauty, art and prophecy, loss and yearning. In his tender yet terrible reading of the human condition, Anthony Butts has become a poet of pain and sorrow and, finally, of the barest budding of hope.
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Q Road: A Novel
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Combining the modern-farm-life realities of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres with the quirky humor and eccentric characters of Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Q Road is a charming debut from Bonnie Jo Campbell. Greenland Township, Michigan: On the same acres where farmers once displaced Potawatomi Indians, suburban developers now supplant farmers and prefab homes spring up in last year's cornfields. All along Q Road—or “Queer Road,” as the locals call it—the old, rural life collides weirdly with the new. With a cast of lovingly rendered eccentrics and a powerful sense of place, Q Road is a lively tale of nature and human desire that alters the landscape of contemporary fiction.
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I Sailed with Magellan
Stuart Dybek
Following his renowned The Coast of Chicago and Childhood, story writer Stuart Dybek returns with eleven masterful and masterfully linked stories about Chicago's fabled and harrowing South Side. United, they comprise the story of Perry Katzek and his widening, endearing clan. Through these streets walk butchers, hitmen, mothers and factory workers, boys turned men and men turned to urban myth. I Sailed With Magellan solidifies Dybek's standing as one of our finest chroniclers of urban America.
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Twisted From The Ordinary: Essays On American Literary Naturalism
Mary E. Papke
American literary naturalism both seduces and repulses the reader, disrupting stable notions of individual and moral coherence. Usually associated with works such as Frank Norris’s McTeague and Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” naturalism draws on nineteenth-century theories of hereditary and environmental determinism, emphasizing the role of chance in characters’ struggles for survival in an increasingly industrial, capitalistic, urban jungle. The essays in this volume revise the canon of naturalism, looking beyond the classic period of the 1890s to uncover naturalistic tendencies already at work in such mid-nineteenth-century authors as Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and to elucidate the naturalistic themes exploited more recently by postmodern authors such as Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo. While canonical figures—Norris, Crane, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton—are represented, the approaches to these authors’ works are innovative, appealing to concepts as diverse as Foucault’s clinical gaze, the perversion of the gift economy, the rapacious competition implicit in the acquisition of cultural capital, the erasure of racial difference from the urban landscape, and the moral critique of individual freedom. Other essays deal with writers not primarily identified with naturalism, including Henry James, whose treatment of human agency is also central to early modernism, and Jane Addams, whose explicit moralism lays bare naturalism’s often hidden reform agenda. A stimulating, unique collection, Twisted from the Ordinary tests the generic boundaries of American literary naturalism and shows its ongoing relevance in understanding a broad set of themes, ranging from Victorian sentimentalism and the overdetermination of violence in true-crime novels to the ethical implications of recent scientific research and the social forces shaping selfhood in the twenty-first century. The Editor: Mary E. Papke is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton and Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook.
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My Father Had a Daughter: Judith Shakespeare's Tale
Grace Tiffany
In this wonderfully inventive novel, Grace Tiffany weaves fact with fiction to bring Judith Shakespeare to vibrant life. Through Judith's eyes, we glimpse the world of her famous playwright father: his work, his family, and his inspiration.
