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| hope college > academic departments > english |
Faculty Books
Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, Approaching Literature: Writing + Reading + Thinking (2d ed.; Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008).
Peter Schakel, Is Your Lord Large Enough? How C. S. Lewis Expands Our View of God (InterVarsity Press, 2008).
Heather Sellers, The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008).
John Cox, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Baylor University Press, 2007).
Kathleen Verduin and Christopher James Prins, editors, A. James Prins: A Life in Literature (Holland, Michigan, 2007).
Heather Sellers, The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Press, 2007).
Dianne R. Portfleet, Walter Wangerin, Jr.: Artist, Poet, and Prophet (2007).
D. R. James, Psychological Clock (Pudding House Press, 2007).
Barbara A. Mezeske and Richard J. Mezeske, editors, Beyond Tests and Quizzes: Creative Assessments in the College Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
D. R. James, Lost Enough: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2007).
Jackie Bartley, Ordinary Time (New York: Spire Press, 2007).
Rhoda Janzen, Babel's Stair (WordTech Communications, 2006).
Heather Sellers, Chapter After Chapter: Discover the Dedication And Focus You Need to Write the Book of Your Dreams (Writers Digest Books, 2006).
D. R. James, A Little Instability without Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2006).
Jack Ridl, Outside the Center Ring (Pudding House Publications, 2006).
Jack Ridl, Broken Symmetry (Great Lakes Books, 2006).
Diane Portfleet, ed. A History of the Adventure Mining Company from the Ancient Miners to the Present (Greenleaf-Witcop Press, 2005).
Charles Huttar and Bruce Johnson, editors Scandelous Truths: Essays by and about Susan Howatch (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna Univerity Press, 2005).
Peter Schakel The Way into Narnia: A Reader's Guide (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).
Jackie Bartley Women Fresh From Water (Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2005).
Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, Approaching Literature in the 21st Century: Fiction, Poetry, Drama (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005).
Heather Sellers, Page After Page: How to Start Writing and Keep Writing No Matter What! (Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 2004).
Jackie Bartley Hobo Signs (Thirdstone Press, Saugatuck, Michigan, 2004).
 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.
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.
 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.
 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.
Peter Schakel, Jack Ridl, 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.
 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).
 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, 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."  Peter J. Schakel and Jack Ridl, 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.
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.
 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.
Howard W. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, 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.”
 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.
 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.
 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.
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.
 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.
 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.
 Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, 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.
 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.
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.
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.”
 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.
 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.
 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.
 Diane R. Portfleet, Shaping Our Lives with Words of Power: A Study of the Major Works of Walter Wangerin, Jr (1996).Description Forthcoming.
 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  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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.”
 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.
 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, 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.” |
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Francis Fike, Off and On (Edgewood, Kentucky: Robert L. Barth, 2000).