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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Abbo of Fleury, Abbo of Saint-Germain-Des-Pres, and Acta Sanctorum
Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, Paul E. Szarmach, E. Gordon Whatley, and Deborah A. Oosterhouse
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Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art
Clifford Davidson
Gesture and movement on stage in early drama have previously received very little attention in scholarship. The present collection of essays is the first book to present sensible, penetrating, and wide-ranging discussions of the gestural effects that were integral to the early stage. In addition to consideration of the influence of classical rhetoric and reference to medieval texts and documents, the essays carefully bring to bear evidence from the art of the period and hence will be of great importance for those interested in the visual arts as well as the theater; eschewing both the naive methodologies promoted in past criticism and ephemeral theoretical concerns, the book is truly ground-breaking. These essays will need to be perused by every serious theater historian or student of art concerned with the late Middle Ages.
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Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate
Georgiana Donavin, Carol Poster, and Richard Utz
These studies illustrate the various high and late medieval transformations of formal and formalized argument, from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective and it challenges today's dominant disciplinary approaches to what was and is still a pervasive mode of thought in the West. Many current treatments of disputational texts have a narrow focus either on the history of scholasticism, rhetoric, and pedagogy, or the genesis and function of such period-specific forms of academic altercation as demonstrative, dialectic, or sophistic disputation, or the later quaestiones, quodlibeta, and sophismata. Moreover, scholarship in literature often ignores the parallel structures of academic argument and narrowly focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of debate poetry. In contrast to these tendencies, the contributions to this volume afford a view which enables readers to recognize that the manifold formalized discursive practices of positing a thesis, constructing a counter antithesis, and then finding a synthesis permeated not only the cathedral schools and universities and their direct textual products (commentaries, formal disputations, sermons, and so forth), but were received by a wide range of other discursive realms. Especially in the high and late Middle Ages the academic disputation gradually moved from the isolation of the universities and toward extracurricular forms of debate between theologians (e.g., the public quaestiones disputatae; epistolary theological debates between Christians and Muslims) and in literary genres (e.g. querelle, debate poem). By confronting sample investigations from all these related forms of medieval argument, the volume examines the ways in which disputational forms - sometimes directly dependent on academic practices, sometimes showing organizational, structural, and discursive parallels - established themselves as a central mode of thinking for Western society. To achieve this goal, the volume unites contributions from the English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian traditions of the disputational mode and discusses central issues of academic, political, theological, courtly and literary debates.
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Dutch in Michigan
Larry Ten Harmsel
Even though they are historically one of the smaller immigrant streams, nineteenth-century Dutch migrants and their descendants have made parts of West Michigan their own. The first Dutch in Michigan were religious dissenters whose commitment to Calvinism had long-reaching effects on their communities, even in the face of later waves of radicalized industrial immigrants and the challenges of modern life. From Calvin College to Meijer Thrifty Acres and the Tulip Festival, the Dutch presence has enriched and informed people throughout the state. Larry ten Harmsel skillfully weaves together the strands of history and modern culture to create a balanced and sensitive portrayal of this vibrant community.
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Trouble Lights
William Olsen
Traveling from the rural Midwest and Chicago, his mythic childhood city, to the outposts of Cornwall and far-off Guangzhou, William Olsen searches for the miracle of wholeness in the small details. An urgency inhabits his poems as they lament and protest a pandemic disrespect for all things natural and the replacement of such with material progress. Olsen seeks to make a truly substantial inquiry into human existence, which leads him to test the adequacy of language. Filling his verses with a dazzling language that challenges, transports, questions, and intoxicates, he thus creates a genuine surrealism. His meditations on contemporary life are bleak but fiercely truthful - providing that paradox of literature, the exhilaration of feeling even when reading of the tragic. It is Olsen's distinct awe for our universe that offers hope for retrieving all that is being lost.
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The Trials and Joys of Marriage
Eve Salisbury
The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. In so doing, according to the Introduction, they allow us to interrogate the traditional assumptions that shape the idea of the medieval household. The trials of marriage seem to outweigh its joys at times and, as some of these texts suggest, maintaining a sense of humor in the face of what must have been great difficulty could have been no easy task. The texts bridge generic categories. Some are obscure, written by anonymous authors; others are familiar, written by the likes of John Lydgate, John Wyclif, and William Dunbar. Taken together they suggest that, despite the fact that marriage had become a sacrament in the twelfth century and was increasingly recognized by ecclesiastical and secular authorities as a valuable social institution, it was not always a stabilizing and orderly social force.
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Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts
Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price
"Challenges readers to acknowledge the extent to which violence figured in medieval texts and, with this recognition, to reconsider what the works teach us not only about the treatments and troping of victims in the medieval world but also how these patterns are a part of the social history of domestic violence."--Ann Dobyns, University of Denver Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts addresses a topic critical to our understanding of the medieval past--its notions of childhood and marital relations, its attitudes toward corporal punishment, and its contribution to the shaping of our present-day notions of family values. Using a wide range of late medieval narratives, including poetry, law, sermons, saints' lives, drama, and iconography, the authors explore the meaning and social effects of punitive violence within the domestic sphere. As the first collection to analyze such early manifestations of a problem still afflicting society today, it will be an insightful reference not only for medievalists but for students of literature, history, sociology, psychology, and law as well. Contents: Introduction, by Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price Part One. Domestic Violence and the Law 1. Interpreting Silence: Domestic Violence in the King's Courts in East Anglia, 1422-1442, by Philippa Maddern 2. The "Reasonable" Laws of Domestic Violence in Late Medieval England, by Emma Hawkes Part Two. Fictional Histories: Domestic Violence and Literary/Legal Texts 3. Chaucer's "Wife," the Law, and the Middle English Breton Lays, by Eve Salisbury 4. Taboo and Transgression in Gower's Appollonius of Tyre, by Georgiana Donavin 5. Reframing the Violence of the Father: Reverse Oedipal Fantasies in Chaucer's Clerk's, Man of Law's, and Prioress's Tales, by Barrie Ruth Straus 6. Not Safe Even in Their Own Castles: Reading Domestic Violence Against Children in Four Middle English Romances, by Graham N. Drake 7. Domestic Violence in the Decameron, by Marilyn Migiel 8. Reading Riannon: The Problematics of Motherhood in Pwyll Pendeuic, by Christopher G. Nugent Part Three. Historical Fictions: Domestic Violence in Chronicle, Drama, Hagiography, and Illuminations 9. The "Homicidal Women" Stories in the Roman de Thebes, the Brut Chronicles, and Deschamps' "Ballade 285," by Anna Roberts 10. Noah's Wife: The Shaming of the "Trew," by Garrett P. J. Epp 11. Marriage, Socialization, and Domestic Violence in The Life of Christina of Markyate, by Robert Stanton 12. Imperial Violence and the Monstrous Mother: Cannibalism at the Siege of Jerusalem, by Merrall Llewelyn Price 13. The Feminized World and Divine Violence: Texts and Images of the Apocalypse, by Anne Laskaya
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Traces of Gold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature
Nicolas S. Witschi
Broadening our understanding of what constitutes "realism," Nicolas Witschi artfully demonstrates the linkage of American literary realism to the texts, myths, and resources of the American West.
From Gold Rush romances to cowboy Westerns, from hard-boiled detective thrillers to nature writing, the American West has long been known mainly through hackneyed representations in popular genres. But a close look at the literary history of the West reveals a number of writers who claim that their works represent the "real" West. As Nicolas Witschi shows, writers as varied as Bret Harte, John Muir, Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and Raymond Chandler have used claims of textual realism to engage, replicate, or challenge commonly held assumptions about the West, while historically acknowledged realists like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain have often relied on genre-derived impressions about the region.
The familiar association of the West with nature and the "great outdoors" implies that life in the West affords an unambiguous relationship with an unalloyed, non-human, real nature. But through a combination of textual scholarship, genre criticism, and materialist cultural studies, Witschi complicates this notion of wide open spaces and unfettered opportunity. The West has been the primary source of raw materials for American industrial and economic expansion, especially between the California Gold Rush and World War II, and Witschi argues that the writers he examines exist within the intersections of cultural and material modes of production. Realistic depictions of Western nature, he concludes, must rely on the representation of the extraction of material resources like minerals, water, and oil.
With its forays into ecocriticism and cultural studies, Traces of Gold will appeal to students and scholars of American literature, American studies, and western history.
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The Good People of New York
Thisbe Nissen
When Roz Rosenzweig meets Edwin Anderson fumbling for keys on the stoop of a Manhattan walk-up, the last thing on her mind is falling for a polite Nebraskan–yet fall for him she does. So begins Thisbe Nissen’s breathtaking debut novel, a decidedly urban fairy tale that follows Roz and Edwin as they move from improbable courtship to marriage to the birth of daughter Miranda–the locus of all Roz’s attention, anxiety, and often smothering affection. As Miranda comes of age and begins to chafe against the intensity of her mother’s neurotic love, Roz must do her best to let those she cherishes move into the world without her. On crowded subways, in strange bedrooms, at Bar Mitzvahs, in brownstone basements and high school gymnasiums, Nissen’s unforgettable characters make their hilarious and wrenching way–and prove, indeed, that good things thrive in New York City.
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How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women
Mark Twain and John Cooley
Boyhood is the most familiar province of Mark Twain's fiction, but a reader doesn't have to look far to find feminine territory—and it's not the perfectly neat and respectable place where you'd expect to see Becky Thatcher. This is a fictional world where rather than polishing their domestic arts and waiting for marriage proposals, girls are fighting battles, riding stallions, rescuing boys from rivers, cross-dressing, debating religion, hunting, squaring off against angry bulls, or, in what may be the most flagrant flouting of Victorian convention, marrying other women. This special edition brings together the best of Twain's stories about unconventional girls and women, from Eve as she names the animals in Eden to Joan of Arc to the transvestite farce of a young man named Alice from the Wapping district of London. Whatever they're doing—bopping boys with a baseball bat in "Hellfire Hotchkiss," treating the author to a life story and a dogsled ride in "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance," or sacrificing all for the sake of a horse, as in "A Horse's Tale"—these women and girls are surprising, provocative, and irresistibly entertaining in the great Twain tradition in which they now finally take their rightful place.
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Two Suns in the Sky
Miriam Bat-Ami
During World War II, a 15-year-old girl meets a young Jewish refugee in a New York shelter and soon learns the history behind her city through interaction with her new friend, as well as the barriers that exist when different cultures unite. Winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.
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Reach for the Sun Selected Letters 1978-1994
Charles Bukowski
Literary Criticism. Reach for the Sun is the third volume of Bukowski's letters from Black Sparrow Press, selected by Seamus Cooney.
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Four Romances of England
Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury
Fitted with ample introductions, notes, and glosses, this volume will make an excellent text for a class of any level on Middle English romance. This excellent edition includes King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, and Athelston. These romances all deal with the Matter of Britain-that is, they celebrate action and adventure tales taking place in England. Featuring all the hallmarks of a good romance, these works include disinherited nobles, thrilling battles, love stories, dragons, and all sorts of marvels and adventures. Spanning the mid thirteenth to the late fourteenth century, these works provide an excellent cross section of the wonderful world of Middle English romances featuring the escapades of their fantastical countrymen.
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Lessons to Share on Teaching Grammar in Context
Constance Weaver
With Teaching Grammar in Context, thousands of teachers discovered why students achieve better results when they learn grammar during the process of writing. In Lessons to Share, Connie Weaver's promised sequel, she focuses on the practical, offering valuable "lessons" from educators at all levels.
The first section of the book addresses the learning and teaching of grammar, setting the stage for subsequent sections. The purpose behind the article on how language is learned is to help readers understand that babies and preschoolers acquire the grammar of their language without direct instruction and that language continues to develop indirectly during children's school years. Connie's article on teaching grammar in the context of writing articulates other aspects of the rationale that underlies this book: teaching grammar in the context of its use.
The second and major section deals with teaching grammar through writing, across the grades. The authors address punctuation, parts of speech, effective word choice and syntax, and conferencing with students to teach revision and editing. The next section focuses on style, with emphasis on sentence composing, "image grammar," and "breaking the rules" for stylistic effect. There is also a discussion of the power of dialects and the dialects of power. The last section deals with teaching the English language and its grammar to ESL students in kindergarten through college. The section and book conclude with an article on using grammar checking computer software.
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Practicing What We Know : Informed Reading Instruction
Constance Weaver
Collection of articles, some previously published. Includes bibliographical references and index.
