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Jack Ridl and Peter Schakel, editors, 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002). 250 Poems collects poetry in English over the past five hundred years, with an emphasis on poetry of the past fifty years including writers from various American ethnic groups. The volume is chronologically organized and includes annotation, biographical notes on the poets, and a glossary of poetic terms.

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Francis Fike, After the Serpent's Word (Santa Barbara, California: Fithian Press, 1997). This collection of forty-three poems blends together new works with some that were published earlier. Well-known poet and critic X. J. Kennedy, commenting on the book, says Fike “finds grace and ceremony in the ordinary. . . . I admire his lyrics, his epigrams, his skilled translations from Old English, French, and Latin. Fike aims high: clearly he sets himself to write in the great tradition of those who insisted, like Hardy and the late master formalist Yvor Winters, on clear sense, moral insight, and tightly controlled craft.”
Jack Ridl, Against Elegies (2001). A collection of poems that was selected by Sharon Dolan and Billy Collins, then U.S. Poet Laureate, for the 2001 Chapbook Award from The Center for Book Arts in New York City.
Kathleen Verduin and Christopher James Prins, editors, A. James Prins: A Life in Literature (Holland, Michigan, 2007). Jim Prins, a professor in Hope College’s English Department from 1946 to 1981, was legendary for his impassioned courses on the classic novels of the United States, England, continental Europe, and Russia. This book collects Prins’s public writings—the famous “Last Chance Talk,” literary essays and reviews, a chapter from his dissertation on Bleak House, and a 1975 interview—but also a treasury of his carefully prepared lecture notes, where former students will hear his voice again. Memoirs and poems by colleagues, friends, and family complete the volume.
Jack Ridl and Peter Schakel, Approaching Literature in the 21st Century: Fiction, Poetry, Drama (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005). Approaching Literature is a textbook intended for second semester first-year writing courses or second-year introduction to literature courses with a writing emphasis. Its distinctive feature is its emphasis on cultural diversity: over two-thirds of the literary works included in it are by ethnic American writers or writers outside North America. It combines a fresh and accessible treatment of the literary elements of each genre with a wide-ranging collection of interesting, teachable stories, poems, and plays. It is supported by a LiterActive CD-ROM and electronic resources such as Virtual Interactive Tutorials and LitLinks, found on the Bedford/St. Martin’s web site.
Jack Ridl and Peter Schakel, Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997). Approaching Poetry is a textbook organized around two premises: First, an introduction to poetry needs to alleviate the fear with which many students approach poetry. It meets that need by its empathetic tone, its clear and careful explanations of technical material, and the reader-oriented approach which undergirds it. Second, introductions to poetry cannot be theory-free. Approaching Poetry begins, therefore, by explaining its underlying assumptions directly; it blends theoretical considerations into its introduction to the elements of poetry; and it offers alternative perspectives from which to approach and engage with a poem.

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Rhoda Janzen, Babel's Stair (WordTech Communications, 2006). "A Mennonite childhood, a young adulthood as a fashion model, an academic career in places as far-flung as Los Angeles and a small Michigan town: Rhoda Janzen weaves these autobiographical elements together in poems that are at once unpredictable in their developments and disciplined in their formalities. 'Bible Belt,' from which this collection's title comes, sets an admirably high standard, met time and again by other poems here. Sensuous even as they are learned, at home with the vulgar as well as with the elegant, and characterized by 'a superb boldness / at facing facts' yet surpassing strange withal, they combine to make a brilliantly various, wickedly alluring, and surprisingly mature first volume."--Stephen Yenser
Jack Ridl, be-tween (1988). A collection of poems in two sections. Part one offers poems based on personal history and part two is a series of meditations.
Barbara A. Mezeske and Richard J. Mezeske, editors, Beyond Tests and Quizzes: Creative Assessments in the College Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007). "Written for instructors who are striving to creatively change assessment practice to better reflect learner-centered teaching, this book considers the multiple ways in which individuals learn content and the multiple avenues to assessment the variety of learning styles demands. The assessment models presented include concept mapping, variable grading, learning logs, moving from memorization to analysis, making labs more practical, exams as learning experiences, web-based assessment, thinking styles, tracking learning over time, and assessment in the real world."
Jackie Bartley, Bloodroot (Lewiston: Mellen Poetry Press, 2002). "In Bloodroot, Jackie Bartley explores the subtle marriage between spirit and imagination. Restless yet patient, inquisitive yet accepting, these poems take a long careful look at the past and the ways it can survive in us. Cumulatively , they reveal a stubborn optimism and a deep reverence for human life." —-Chase Twichell (author of The Snow Watcher, The Ghost of Eden, Perdido, The Odds, Northern Spy).
Heather Sellers, The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press, 2007). "In a world in which people speak in clichés and platitudes, Heather Sellers’ stunning new collection of poems The Boys I Borrow, transcends the quotidian events of our day. I’ve read novels that have not developed relationships between people in marriage as well as this. In poems that deftly insert lyric moments in narrative poems, she uncovers the nuances of infertility, a new marriage and the changes in life before and after all of the above. If you know anything about the difference between desire and love and the realities that blur between them, if you’ve lived any life at all you’ll 'remember, you have lived this way, always hungry' for more." -A. Van Jordan
Jack Ridl, Broken Symmetry (Great Lakes Books, 2006). A collection drawn from the experiences of daily life and organized through the context of mathematics. Poet Jack Ridl uses remarkably clear and precise language to express a singular awareness of the world around us. Some of the poems in this volume deal with the universal human experience of loss, others discover a fresh perspective on what is easily overlooked, and many seek the goodness and joy that remain in a challenging world. Poems are grouped into chapters by mathematical themes, suggesting a commonality in these two separate worlds that is often overlooked.

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Heather Sellers, Chapter After Chapter: Discover the Dedication And Focus You Need to Write the Book of Your Dreams (Writers Digest Books, 2006). Writing a book requires a focus, a sense of knowing and trusting in yourself and your work. And it requires an unflinching commitment to staying the course. Chapter After Chapter shows you how to build on your good writing habits, accrue and recognize tiny successes, and turn your dedication to the craft into the book you always knew you could write if you could just stay with it. You'll discover how to celebrate the momentum of slow and steady, stay in love with your book project through soggy middles and long revisions, and embrace the nakedness that is creative expression.

Peter J. Schakel, editor, Critical Approaches to Teaching Swift (New York: AMS Press, 1992). This collection of essays offers help in teaching one of the most challenging of eighteenth-century British authors, Jonathan Swift. The book opens with a survey, by Professor Schakel, of approaches taken in Swift criticism of the twentieth century. The twenty essays that follow explore Swift’s methods and themes from a wide diversity of critical and theoretical perspectives: historical, formalistic, generic, rhetorical, feminist, reader-response, poststructuralist, and pedagogical. Behind the book lie the assumptions that teachers should be self-conscious about the critical approach or approaches they inevitably employ, and that the “conversation” between different approaches enriches understanding of both Swift and his works.

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John Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350-1642 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). A complete survey of plays that include staged devils from the beginning of drama in English to the closing of the theaters by parliament in 1642. The book argues that the pattern for staging devils was established in pre-Reformation drama and remained virtually unchanged by the Reformation. Important vestiges of that pattern continued to appear in commercial plays (including two by Shakespeare) until the effective end of the tradition in the mid-seventeenth century.

Heather Sellers, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2002). The poems in this book tell a story set in a Florida both lush and oppressive, where similar paradoxes confront the child who would be both open to everything and permanently safe. The girl-body's relationship to otherness—the masculine, but also the overpowering natural world€—as it is distracted by desire plays a key role in these slant, crackly, truly original poems.

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Peter Schakel, Howard W. Weinbrot, and Stephen E. Karian, editors, Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Conceived to honor Phillip Harth, the Merritt Y. Hughes Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, this book collects fifteen essays by internationally distinguished contributors. The essays consider literary, intellectual, political, theological, and cultural aspects of the years 1650-1800 in the British Isles and Europe. At the center of the book is Jonathan Swift, but authors such as Congreve, Pope, Richardson, and Boswell. The volume includes an essay by Professor Schakel, “Swift’s Voices: Innovation and Complication in the Poems Written at Market Hill.”

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Barbara A. Mezeske and Richard J. Mezeske, editors, Finding Our Way: Reforming Teacher Education in the Liberal Arts Setting (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). This book tells the story of how the education faculty in a small, Midwestern liberal arts college recovered from the loss of its NCATE accreditation. The faculty revitalized, reconceptualized, and redesigned their teacher education program, regaining accreditation in the process. Among the areas addressed are developing a conceptual framework and an assessment plan, the teaching of literacy and writing, field placements, technology integration, creative staffing, and diversity. What emerges is a portrait of a faculty engaged in a vibrant and developmental process of change and reform.

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Heather Sellers, Georgia Under Water (Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2001). Meet Georgia. She lives in Florida and she's never far from the ocean or a pool. She's a nail-chewer, a scab-picker, a daydreamer, and everything that a little girl struggling under the awkward pain of growing up should be. She's the child-hero of the nine linked stories in Heather Seller's Georgia Under Water, and in this remarkable debut collection, Sellers offers an honest, bittersweet, and often funny picture of adolescence.

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Dianne Portfleet, ed. A History of the Adventure Mining Company from the Ancient Miners to the Present (Greenleaf-Witcop Press, 2005). The History of the Adventure Mine is one that is filled with mysteries. This compilation begins with the ancient miners (whose identity is still debated); it continues through the early attempts at mining by Europeans; and it concludes with the discovery, establishment, and ongoing development of the Adventure Mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from 1848 to the present. Today there is more probably copper and silver in the mine than has been extracted in all the preceeding years.

Jackie Bartley Hobo Signs (Thirdstone Press, Saugatuck, Michigan, 2004). Migrant workers and vagrants who hitch from town to town by rail have been called hoboes since the late 19th century. Over the years, these transients, like other marginalized or ostracized people, developed a system of symbols to communicate with one another. They scrawled these signs on fence posts, trees, sheds, boulders, anywhere those who followed might see them and recognize their meaning. These poems are based on a dozen of those symbols. Includes woodcut illustrations by Nels Oestreich.

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David Klooster, et al, editors, Ideas Without Boundaries: International Education Reform Through Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking (International Reading Association, 2000). Educators from nine former socialist countries gathered in the summer of 1997 with volunteers from the United States and Canada to launch a new international school improvement project called Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking, RWCT. They based their efforts on two major tenets: (1) Schools can contribute to the formation of open societies and democratic cultures by helping students to become individuals who create, question, and apply knowledge responsibly; and (2) Educators across vast cultural divides can work together to bring about educational reform.
Peter J. Schakel, Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). The first thorough analysis of C. S. Lewis's theory of imagination, including the different ways he used the word and how those uses relate to each other. The book considers three works in which imagination is the central theme--Surprised by Joy, An Experiment in Criticism, and The Discarded Image--and shows the important role of imagination in Lewis's theory of education. It goes on to examine imagination and reading in Lewis's fiction, concentrating on the Narnia with attention to the illustrations, revisions of the texts, their order, and their narrative "voice." It then explores Lewis's ideas about imagination in music, dance, art, and architecture, and concludes with analysis of the "moral imagination."
Charles Huttar, editor, Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971). This volume, honoring Clyde Kilby upon his retirement from the faculty of Wheaton College, is made up of eighteen essays in four categories: (1) Art and Philosophy; (2) Writers in the Christian Tradition; (3) Inklings and Ancestors; and (4)Aspects of the Contemporary Scene. It includes an essay be Professor Huttar, “Samson’s Identity Crisis and Milton’s.”
Francis Fike, In the Same Rivers (Florence, Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 1989). The eighteen poems in this chapbook experiment with a variety of metrical and stanzaic forms. Poems on love, loss, and the passing of time form a unifying motif in the collection (“Lakeside,” “Evening, West of Eden,” “Graveside,’ “Lacuna,” “Doves,” “Going Back,” “Grandfather Plowing,” “Passage,” “Afterglow”). Several of the poems are translations or imitations classical poets.
Francis Fike, In Season and Out (Rockingham, Australia: Equilibrium Books, 2003). The thirty-seven poems in this collection are divided into three sections, or “seasons”: seasons of the mind--on human relationships, attitudes, and behaviors; seasons of the earth--on the cycles and restorative powers of nature and encounters with animals; and seasons of the spirit--on occasions of encountering the Holy.
William Reynolds and Elizabeth Trembley, editors. Its a Print!: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994). The essays in this volume treat true cinematic and television adaptations of works of detective fiction as completely different products from films based loosely on the gimmick or plot or character of a certain work. The essays investigate the many ways in which fiction is transformed into a new art form governed by its own rules and conventions.

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Jack Ridl, Peter Schakel, et al, editors, Literature: A Portable Anthology (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003). This compact anthology is designed for use by general readers and in high school and college introduction to literature classes. Chronologically arranged by genre to convey historical context, the collection opens with thirty-five stories from classic authors such as Poe and Faulkner and current writers such as Alice Walker and Sandra Cisneros. The fiction section is followed by 250 poems, featuring more than 200 poets (70 of them women). The poetry section includes many classic and frequently assigned favorites and the most diverse selection of contemporary American poetry in an anthology of this scope. The book concludes with nine popular and frequently-taught plays.
D. R. James, A Little Instability without Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2006). D. R. James's poems pull us away from the terrible onslaught of daily distraction and lead us back to what matters. He invites us to settle down, maybe in an isolated cabin where the coffee's hot, the weather cold, and introduces us to a guy who welcomes us then talks about what is most disquieting while pointing us toward the reasons to look out the window. We feel somehow comforted and grateful just to be still in the mysterious world. --Jack Ridl
Peter J. Schakel, editor, The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977). The Longing for a Form is the first scholarly book on the fiction of C. S. Lewis. It is made up of fourteen essays, three general studies of the fiction, four on the Ransom trilogy, four on the Chronicles of Narnia, and three on Till We Have Faces. Running through the volume is an emphasis on Form—as literary kind and as structure—and a recurrent attention to three themes of particular importance in Lewis as a writer of fiction: objectivism, longing, and the literary artist as creator. Two of the essays are by Hope College faculty members: “C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and the ‘Grand Design’” by Charles A. Huttar and “Epistemological Release in The Silver Chair” by John D. Cox.
D. R. James, Lost Enough: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2007). "This chapbook of 24 poems is "fictionally autobiographical" and spins off of William Stafford's epigraph in the title poem: "If you're lost enough, then the experience of now is your guide to what comes next." Says the author, "We're all a product of our pasts, yes, but we really only live a series of now's, and that done consciously frees us from what may feel like the lostness of inevitability. There is always the next now." Reflecting on the book, Leah Maines, poet and editor notes, "We are all lost in our own little ways, and James reminds us that life is a mixed bag of memories....[These] poems serve as revelations—life is about finding our way and losing our way, and finding it again."

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Elizabeth Trembley, Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). Until this book, Crichton’s many readers had nowhere to turn for scholarly information on one of America’s most popular novelists. This companion features clear analyses of Crichton’s life and literary influences, as well as chapters on each of his first ten major novels. It will help Crichton’s readers learn more about how events in his life affected the development of his fiction and literary style and how the heritage of popular fiction, including mystery, gothic, adventure, and science fiction, influenced his writing. This study provides a close textual analysis of each novel, by focusing on plot, character development, theme and critical interpretation.

John Cox and David Scott Kastan, A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). This is a collection of twenty-five completely new essays that the editors requested from as many scholars of early drama. The book was planned by eleven former students of David M. Bevington at the University of Chicago, and it is dedicated to him. The book won the Book of the Year Award for 1997 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and one essay, by Peter W. M. Blayney, won a separate award from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. The foreword is by Stephen J. Greenblatt.
Stephen Hemenway, The Novel of India: The Anglo-Indian Novel (vol. 1) (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1975). This volume focuses on E. M. Forster's A Passage to India as a touchstone for evaluating other Anglo-Indian novels (or British novels of India) before and after the 1924 publication of the Forster book. Five literary "problems" are explored in the study of each novel: language, audience, point of view, characterization, and East-West theme. Pre-Forster novels examined include works by Meadows Taylor, Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and Maud Diver. Post-Forster novels scrutinized include works by George Orwell, Rumer Godden, and John Masters.
Stephen Hemenway, The Novel of India (Vol. 2): The Indo-Anglian Novel (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1976). This volume explores the influence of E. M. Forster's "A Passage to India" on Anglo-Indian novels (or fiction written in English by Indians). Several works by pioneers and popularizers of the Indo-Anglian novel--Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Khushwant Singh, and Kamala Markandaya--are assessed. A major section focuses on Raja Rao's Kanthapura and The Serpent and the Rope.

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Francis Fike, Off and On (Edgewood, Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 2000). Most of the poems in this chapbook deal with subjects related in one way or another to the poet’s grandfather, to whom the book is dedicated: “Gramp’s Chicks,” “Haying,” “Walking by the Brook,” “The Encounter,” and “Turnpike Kill.” The centerpiece of the collection is “Sabbath Morning,” an eight-stanza long poem in blank verse replying to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning” which questions the reality of Christian belief in resurrection and afterlife. The book ends with two hymns, “Hymn for Communion” and “Hymn of Praise.”
Jackie Bartley, Ordinary Time (New York: Spire Press, 2007). "Winner of the Spire Poetry Prize. Jackie Bartley's Ordinary Time is a collection of extraordinary poems: each one shimmering in metaphoric richness; each one unwavering in its quiet sense of truth. There are no casual observations in Bartley's universe where every single event is infused with wonder and grace--whether it occurs in an exotic village in Bolivia or the familiar landscape of a Midwest plain. She creates a haunting sense of mythology to understand our broken and modern world, and, in so doing, redeems it, makes it whole, and gives it brilliance. Bartley weaves pure poetry, an amazing gift." --- Linda Nemec Foster
Jack Ridl, Outside the Center Ring (Pudding House Publications, 2006). A chapbook of poems based on the author's childhood summers spent with the circus.

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Heather Sellers, Page After Page: How to Start Writing and Keep Writing No Matter What! (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 2004). Ninety percent of beginning writers stop practicing their craft before they have a chance to discover their talents. This essential and encouraging guide: Helps readers build a writing life, one that will help them continue to write without giving up; Approaches the writing life without using new age and self-help techniques, so writers from all walks of life will benefit from the advice; Provides engaging exercises to help readers shape their writing life and achieve their goals. Written by an author with more than twenty years of teaching and writing experience, Page After Page helps writers keep writing, page after page, day after day.
Greg Rappleye, A Path Between Houses (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). These are tough--minded poems about loss, and what comes afterwards-the difficult work of rebuilding a life. Greg Rappleye gathers his material across a vast American landscape, from the Florida Keys through the Nevada Desert to the California Coast, rocketing around the country with some strange friends-Odysseus, William Faulkner, Frank Sinatra, and private eye Jim Rockford. Rappleye is not afraid to implicate the self, building a heroic persona in the classic sense-a person in whom the flaws are as celebrated as the occasional triumph. Winner of 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.
David Klooster and Russell Duncan, editors, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). Alone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. This volume gathers for the first time virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war, from letters composed on the field of battle to maps he drew as a topographical engineer, from his masterful short stories to his final ruminations before he disappeared into Mexico. His accounts provide a compelling record of the battlefield, the psychological traumas the war induced in its soldiers, and the memories that would haunt survivors.
Peter J. Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift: Allusion and the Development of a Poetic Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). This book examines Swift's use of classical and contemporary allusions and shows how he uses allusions to clarify or reinforce their themes and to establish or strengthen their tones. The book traces Swift’s development as a poetic craftsman from the early odes, where allusions are scattered and decorative, through the early verse satires and classical imitations, where Swift learned that conventions borrowed from others could free him to give attention to descriptive and satiric detail, to the later satires, where such borrowings become integral to the poems, unifying structure, tone, and theme.
Heather Sellers, The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008). "New for the introduction to creative writing course, The Practice of Writing, by Heather Sellers, gets students writing, keeps them writing, and introduces them to life-long writer's habits. The approach is inviting and accessible and includes a unique emphasis on reading as a writer."
D. R. James, Psychological Clock (Pudding House Press, 2007). "This chapbook of 24 poems, in a variety of forms, includes some of D. R. James's most exicting work: "The Day I got My Timing Down," "New Year's Resolution," "Lakeside Birdfeeder, Wet Snow," "The Same Game," "Lakeside Birdfeeder, Squirrels," "Field Notes, from an Old Chair," "April Fool," "School Bus," "Sons and a Father," "I Don't know the Biochemsitry of a Hummingbird," "One Kind of Faith," "To Be: It's not a Question," "Whose Life Is It, Anyway?", "Great Blue Heron," "Qualifications," "If Only I moved by Instinct," "A Couple of October Options," "World Lit. Postcards," "Only This Just In," "Recycling," "Man to Man with the Folks' New Condo," "Guano Glorioso," "Pscyhological Clock," "Bon Voyage!"

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Peter J. Schakel, Reading with the Heart: The Way into Narnia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979). Reading with the Heart is a literary/critical study of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It explores the archetypal structure, characters, and symbols Lewis used to develop the universal themes and motifs of the books, and the Christian significance he wove into the stories, particularly through echoes of and allusions to his well-known book Mere Christianity. The book is available on-line.
Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of “Till We Have Faces” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984). The first half of this book is a close analysis of C. S. Lewis’s most difficult work of fiction, Till We Haves Faces (1956). It leads the reader through the plot, clarifying themes as it discusses structure, symbols, and allusions. The second half places TWHF in context by surveying Lewis’s works, tracing the tension between reason and imagination. Awarded the 1985 Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies by the Mythopoeic Society. The first half is on line at Reason and Imagination.
William Pannapacker, Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Revised Lives examines self-representation in U.S. culture from the American Revolution through the nineteenth century. Drawing on studies of the history of the book and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, this book focuses on the processes of national development, the self-construction of authorial personae, and the appropriation of authors by interpretive communities. Special emphasis is given to Walt Whitman, but other figures are treated at length: P. T. Barnum, Edward Carpenter, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Charles A. Huttar and Peter J. Schakel, The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996). In this collection of essays, nineteen scholars examine the rhetorical means that English author Charles Williams (1886-1945) employed to convey his metaphysical, ethical, and social vision, and the rhetorical theories that guided him. About half of the essays consider Williams’s fiction; the others discuss his poetry, plays, historical and theological writings, and literary criticism. The volume was awarded the 1997 Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies by the Mythopoeic Society.
Julie Kipp, Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). This book examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so prevalent during the Romantic period. These discussions rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance. Kipp's primary concern is to trace ways that writers deployed representations of mother-child bonds variously as a means to naturalize, endorse, and critique Enlightenment constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations.

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Charles Huttar and Bruce Johnson, editors Scandalous Truths: Essays by and about Susan Howatch (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna Univerity Press, 2005). Susan Howatch's bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 80s made reviewers and then academics stare hard at her pages. Scandelous Truths provides a way into Howatch's world by presenting for the first time some of her own articulations of her guiding principles, and by allowing a group of scholars to engage in a wide-ranging discussion of her art. A decade of scholarly presentations and articles now culminates in this book.
John Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Baylor University Press, 2007). "Seeming Knowledge is impressive not only for its vast, in-depth coverage of Shakespeare's works, but also for its compelling argumentation. John Cox is extremely well-read in early Tudor and Elizabethan theater and also in the works of Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal and others. His application of these works to Shakespeare is subtle and original. His book is in fact a powerful invitation to rethink our usual understanding of skepticism in the Renaissance and in Shakespeare. By being skeptical of skepticism, Cox profoundly redefines our view of Shakespeare's relation to faith and religion. This work is a major contribution to the field." --Dr. Jean-Christophe Mayer
John Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). This is a study of Shakespeare's plays against the background of medieval religious drama. The argument is that the radical social and political dimensions of Shakespeare are often, anticipated by his prececessors on the English stage, who therefore offer a more credible explanation for the plays' outlook than those typically offered by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. In short, the book argues that postmodern critics of Shakespeare are often right but for the wrong reasons.
John Cox and Eric Rasmussen, editors, Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part 3 (London: Thomson Learning for the Arden Shakespeare, Third Edition, 2001). This is a completely new edition of Shakespeare's early history play. Professor Cox wrote the introduction, the notes, the appendices, and the index. The Arden Shakespeare is the foremost scholarly edition of Shakespeare. The first series was published early in the twentieth century; the second, in the mid-twentieth. This is the first series for the twenty-first century.
Dianne R. Portfleet, Shaping Our Lives with Words of Power: A Study of the Major Works of Walter Wangerin, Jr (1996). Description Forthcoming.
Heather Sellers, Spike and Cubby's Ice Cream Island Adventure (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). Spike and Cubby are the best of friends. They are also a working dog team: Cubby is a writer with no time for interruptions, and Spike's an illustrator with a knack for distracting. But when the distraction is the amazing Ice Cream Island--specializing in Spumoni Baloney Grande--what dog can resist? This playful adventure proves that friendship can weather more than a bit of rough-and-tumble, and especially that a little distraction (and a yummy treat) can lead to inspiration.
Kathleen Verduin, associate editor, Studies in Medievalism. (Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, continuing). Founded by the late Leslie J. Workman and produced at Hope College from 1983 to 1998, this pioneering series established "medievalism"--in Workman's definition, "the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages"--as a new and important academic subject, comparable in scope to classicism and Romanticism. Now edited by the noted medievalist Tom Shippey, Studies in Medievalism continues to explore all facets of the Middle Ages as an idea in western culture since whenever the Middle Ages may be said to have ended (roughly c. 1500) and a significant influence on postmedieval art, architecture, literature, religion, popular culture, and scholarship.

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Jackie Bartley, Threading the Bobbin (2001). I spent a good deal of time watching my mother sew. Later, I learned to sew myself, but, by then, my attitudes about sewing as well as about my life had already been patterned by hers. In our culture, sewing has been perceived as women's domain. That is one of the pieces in identity's garment that young girls have accepted in the past. It is one of many pieces-fashion's dictates, our desire to conform, our need to be considered attractive, the right height, the right weight-in a myriad of external pressures that establish boundaries for the ways we act, dress and think about ourselves.
Jackie Bartley, The Terrible Boundaries of the Body (1997). This collection of poems is the winner of the 1996 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Award.
Kathleen Verduin, editor, True Things: The Writings of H. Dirk Jellema (Holland, Michigan, 1996). Professor Dirk Jellema's untimely death in 1993 deprived Hope's English Department of a beloved poet, teacher, and friend. This memorial volume collects Jellema's poems, reviews, "As I See It" columns, and a rich harvest of personal correspondence in his inimitable style: gruff, skeptical, but always warm-hearted, compassionate, and, as in his deprecating way he liked to put it, "all like that." The craft of writing, the struggle for faith, and the mixed blessing of Dutch heritage predominate as themes. Memoirs and poetic tributes by colleagues and students complete the book.

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Francis Fike, Underbrush (Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 1986). The fourteen poems in this chapbook reflect a variety of the author’s interests: his love of nature, in “Sparrowhawk,” “Beaver Brook,” and “The Warmth Within”; his love of family and ancestry in “The Homestead” and “Death of a Patriarch”; his love of the classics in “Bookplate,” “On Mourning,” and “The Renunciation of Odysseus”; and his love of the sea in “Off Henderson Harbor” and “Cape Hatteras.”

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Dianne R. Portfleet, Walter Wangerin, Jr.: Artist, Poet, and Prophet (2007). "Wangerin talks to us as his readers, and his words 'cause to be what had not been before.' His words create. And 'although only God performs this creative function purely, yet dimly and in a mimic,' Wangerin as a poet 'causes to be what had not been before. He sings and there gathers under the heart of his hearer the pressure of his music, the swelling of a new word, like an infant. . .' And just as this 'creating power of language is potent,' so Wangerin's writings are powerful, and we 'wince with wonder' as his 'language stuns us with a name--and with being.'" ---Dianne R. Portfleet
Peter Schakel The Way into Narnia: A Reader's Guide (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). The Way into Narnia explores how a middle-aged professor with no children came to write books that have become beloved classics of children's literature. It explains the best order for reading The Chronicles of Narnia and offers guidance for first-time visitors to Narnia and fresh insights for those who have traveled there often. Exploring ideas from Lewis's colleague J. R. R. Tolkien, the book shows that the best way to enter Narnia is to read the Chronicles as fairy tales. After walking readers through each of the books, Professor Schakel concludes the tour with a unique selection of annotations that clarify unfamiliar words and unusual passages.
Jackie Bartley Women Fresh From Water (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2005). "In lyrical, wise, deeply connected poems, populated by daughters, new mothers, and elderly women, Women Fresh from Water invites the reader into the world of swimming pools and locker rooms, where a woman comes to shed her earth-self, for a time, to be borne to new, other selves through the medium of water, a condition where, to paraphrase the poet's words, 'she can join others, while losing herself, longing for something to hold her . . . that she might remember who she was." --Priscilla Atkins
Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar, editors, Word and Story in C. S. Lewis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). The sixteen essays in this collection examine Lewis’s ideas about language and narrative, demonstrating that awareness of his theories is essential to an understanding and appreciation of his works. Contributors examine works that had at the time received little attention, such as his poetry, The Dark Tower, and Studies in Words, as well as familiar works such as the Narnia Stories, the Ransom trilogy, Surprised by Joy, and The Allegory of Love. The collection includes an introduction by Professor Schakel and an essay by Professor Huttar, “A Lifelong Love Affair with Language: C. S. Lewis’s Poetry.” Awarded the 1992 Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies by the Mythopoeic Society.
David J. Klooster and Patricia L. Bloem, The Writer's Community (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1995). The Writer's Community helps students to understand the academic and professional discourse communities they hope to join. It provides students with practical strategies for reading and writing prose in the academic disciplines and suggests way to prepare for the writing they will do beyond the university. The Writer's Community encourages students to explore and develop not just one but many styles to suit the audience and the occasion.

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Heather Sellers, Your Whole Life (1995, poetry chapbook). In 1995, I was working on this collection of poems about growing up in weird, wild Florida when my teacher, Jerome Stern, discovered his brain cancer had returned. Jerry is one of the most important people in my life and his illness was painful, terrible, scary, and wrenching. Jerry was an amazing teacher. He was in his office from 7 in the morning until 6 at night. Students would sit in the hall outside his door, waiting for hours for a conference. Jerry made adulthood look interesting. He presented fiction as learning, and as a way of life. As I was writing about childhood, and Jerry was dying, I was thinking a lot about those two losses as twins. The poems in this series started to disrupt themselves and change; the collection tells two stories simultaneously: coming of age, and losing a beloved friend. --Heather Sellers

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