IWU Authors Bookshelf

The Illinois Wesleyan University Authors Bookshelf collection represents the breadth of research and scholarship produced by faculty from nearly all departments, programs and schools on campus.

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We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry

Michael Theune and Bob Broad

The authors introduce a new method for evaluating poetry. We Need to Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry aims to answer the question of how people judge the success of poetic verse, and suggests why and how people who care about poetry should communally explore and document their shared and conflicting values.
Reading and Writing About Literature

Joanne Diaz and Janet E. Gardner

Reading and Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide is an ideal supplement for writing courses where literature anthologies and individual literary works that lack writing instruction are assigned. This brief guide introduces strategies for reading literature, explains the writing process and common writing assignments for literature courses, provides instruction in writing about fiction, poetry, and drama, and includes coverage of writing a research paper as well as sections on literary criticism and theory.

From Amazon
Judaism and the West

Robert Erlewine

From Indiana University Press:

Grappling with the place of Jewish philosophy at the margin of religious studies, Robert Erlewine examines the work of five Jewish philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik—to bring them into dialogue within the discipline. Emphasizing the tenuous place of Jews in European, and particularly German, culture, Erlewine unapologetically contextualizes Jewish philosophy as part of the West. He teases out the antagonistic and overlapping attempts of Jewish thinkers to elucidate the philosophical and cultural meaning of Judaism when others sought to deny and even expel Jewish influences. By reading the canon of Jewish philosophy in this new light, Erlewine offers insight into how Jewish thinkers used religion to assert their individuality and modernity.
Critical Insights: Casablanca

James Plath

From Salem Press:

Considered one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, Casablanca earned three Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and instant critical and commercial success following its release in 1942. Directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, this romantic drama is still hailed for its all-star cast, exceptional screenwriting, and memorable soundtrack, and continues to be ranked as one of the greatest motion pictures ever made.
John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews

James Plath

Updike wrote about his home town of Shillington in Berks County, Pennsylvania for much of his adult life, setting most of his early fiction and all of his award-winning novels in his home state. In John Updike's Pennsylvania Interviews, James Plath has compiled the first collection of interviews that illustrates and helps to explain the bond between one of America's greatest literary talents and his beloved Pennsylvania.
Race, Gender, and Class in the Tea Party: What the Movement Reflects about Mainstream Ideologies

Megan Burke

It has been all too tempting to characterize the Tea Party as an irrational, racist, astro-turf movement composed of members who are working to subvert their own economic interests. Race, Gender, and Class in the Tea Party reveals a much messier and much more fascinating analysis of this movement. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with organizers and fieldwork at conservative campaign trainings and conventions, its rich ethnographic data explores how the active folks in this movement, specifically organizers in one Midwestern state, understand their world, and how they act on that basis to change it. As this book will reveal, most Tea Party organizers do depend on deeply flawed understandings of race and class –either believing wholeheartedly in myths, or confining their analyses to the narrow limits of the conservative media system. Yet, Tea Party racism is simply American racism. Race, Gender, and Class in the Tea Party reveals the complexities and contradictions inherent in this movement, where organizers attempt to reconcile their personal experiences with their conservative politics. In the end, these dynamics reveal as much about us as it does about the Tea Party. It is certain to challenge all of our politics, and especially our scholarly thinking, about the movement, and offers a path toward real conversations about our collective future in the United States.

From Amazon.com
The Whole World is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age

Irving Epstein

The authors of this volume address multiple questions involving the nature of youth protest in the twenty-first century. Through their use of a case study approach, they comment upon the ways in which youth protest has been influenced by the electronic and social media and evaluate the effectiveness of protest activities, many of which were framed in reaction to neo-liberalism and state authoritarianism. A number of the authors further comment upon the utility of employing social movement theory to analyze the nature and character of protest actions, while others situate such events within specific political, social and cultural contexts. The case studies focus upon protest activities in Bahrain, Turkey, Iran, Cambodia, South Africa, China, Russia, Chile, Spain, and the U.S., and together, they offer a comparative analysis of an important global phenomenon. In so doing, the authors further address issues involving the changing nature of globalized protest participation, its immediate and long-term consequences, and the ways in which protests have encouraged a re-evaluation of the nature of inequality, as constructed within educational, social, and political spheres.

From Amazon.com
Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry, Third Edition

James E. House and Kathleen A. House

House’s Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry, Third Edition, provides thoroughly updated coverage of the synthesis, reactions, and properties of elements and inorganic compounds. Ideal for the one-semester (ACS-recommended) sophomore or junior level course in descriptive inorganic chemistry, this resource offers a readable and engaging survey of the broad spectrum of topics that deal with the preparation, properties, and use of inorganic materials.

Using rich graphics to enhance content and maximize learning, the book covers the chemical behavior of the elements, acid-base chemistry, coordination chemistry, organometallic compounds, and numerous other topics to provide a coherent treatment of the field. The book pays special attention to key subjects such as chemical bonding and Buckminster Fullerenes, and includes new and expanded coverage of active areas of research, such as bioinorganic chemistry, green chemistry, redox chemistry, nanostructures, and more.

From Elsevier
Physical Examination & Health Assessment, 7e

Carolyn Jarvis

With an easy-to-read approach and unmatched learning resources, Physical Examination & Health Assessment, 7th Edition offers a clear, logical, and holistic approach to physical exams across the lifespan. A total of 1,200 illustrations, checklists of key exam steps, and practical insights ensure that you learn all the physical exam skills you need to know. Written by Carolyn Jarvis, an experienced educator and clinician, this gold standard in physical examination reflects what is going on in nursing today with coverage of emerging trends and the latest on evidence-based practice. It's easy to see why this text is, far and away, #1 in this field.

From Amazon.com
The Little Magazine in Contemporary America

Joanne Joanne Diaz, Eds. and Ian Morris, Eds.

Little magazines have often showcased the best new writing in America. Historically, these idiosyncratic, small-circulation outlets have served the dual functions of representing the avant-garde of literary expression while also helping many emerging writers become established authors. Although changing technology and the increasingly harsh financial realities of publishing over the past three decades would seem to have pushed little magazines to the brink of extinction, their story is far more complicated. In this collection, Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz gather the reflections of twenty-three prominent editors whose little magazines have flourished over the past thirty-five years. Highlighting the creativity and innovation driving this diverse and still vital medium, contributors offer insights into how their publications sometimes succeeded, sometimes reluctantly folded, but mostly how they evolved and persevered. Other topics discussed include the role of little magazines in promoting the work and concerns of minority and women writers, the place of universities in supporting and shaping little magazines, and the online and offline future of these publications.

From Amazon.com
Hands-On Start to Wolfram Mathematica

Michael Morrison, Cliff Hastings, and Kelvin Mischo

For more than 25 years, Mathematica has been the principal computation environment for millions of innovators, educators, students, and others around the world. This book is an introduction to Mathematica. The goal is to provide a hands-on experience introducing the breadth of Mathematica, with a focus on ease of use. Readers get detailed instruction with examples for interactive learning and end-of-chapter exercises. Each chapter also contains authors tips from their combined 50+ years of Mathematica use.

From Amazon.com
Lemonade

Scott Sheridan

Translated from Italian into English, Sheridan said his greatest challenge may have been capturing the setting and tone of the novel. “It’s a period piece about early 19^th-century England and written by an Italian,” said Sheridan. “I wanted to give it just a hint of Jane Austen without sounding old fashioned or archaic. The book is daring in many ways, from some of the controversial content to the experimental nature of the psychological narrative.”

Lemonade by Nina Pennacchi was published in Italian in 2014. The translated version by Sheridan is now available at amazon.com.
The Open Mind: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland

Kevin Sullivan

Edited by Jonathan Knight and Kevin Sullivan, this Festschrift draws on the research interests of Christopher Rowland. The collection of essays comes from former doctoral students and other friends, many of whom shed light on the angelic contribution to the thought-world of developing Christianity. The significance of the Jewish contribution to developing Christian ideology is critically assessed, including the impact of the original Jewish sources on the earliest Christian belief.

From Amazon.com
American Association of University Professors Policy Documents and Reports

Hans-Joerg Tiede

The AAUP's Policy Documents and Reports (widely known as the Redbook because of the color of its cover) presents in convenient format a wide range of policies, in some instances formulated in cooperation with other educational organizations. The current edition, the eleventh, includes basic statements on academic freedom, tenure, and due process; academic governance; professional ethics; research and teaching; online and distance education; intellectual property; discrimination; collective bargaining; accreditation; and students' rights and freedoms.

The new edition has been thoroughly updated and reorganized thematically. Brief historical introductions have been added to each section, along with an introductory essay on incorporating AAUP principles into faculty handbooks. Among the eighteen new reports included in this edition are statements on academic freedom and outside speakers, campus sexual assault, the inclusion of faculty on contingent appointments in academic governance, and salary-setting practices that unfairly disadvantage women faculty.

From amazon.com
My Favorite Tyrants

Joanne Diaz

Winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye The word "tyrant" carries negative connotations, but in this new collection, Joanne Diaz tries to understand what makes tyranny so compelling, even seductive. These dynamic, funny, often poignant poems investigate the nature of tyranny in all of its forms-political, cultural, familial, and erotic. Poems about Stalin, Lenin, and Castro appear beside poems about deeply personal histories. The result is a powerful exploration of desire, grief, and loss in a world where private relationships are always illuminated and informed by larger, more despotic forces.

From Amazon.com
Incessant Beauty: A Bilingual Anthology

Carmella Ferradans

INCESSANT BEAUTY is a feast for the senses and the mind. Ana Rossetti (from Cádiz, Spain), an award-winning poet and writer, became prominent among the many women poets who used the lifting of Spain’s censorship to produce a fresh, often daring, body of poetry. INCESSANT BEAUTY offers to an English-speaking audience a first glimpse into Rossetti’s eclectic and voracious symbolic universe. Editor and translator Carmela Ferradáns has selected poems that offer a wide range of themes that span more than thirty years, varying from the playful, often cheeky, early poems for which she is well-known, to the more brooding meditations on transcendental human qualities, to the latest festive celebrations of the poetic word itself.

From Amazon.com.
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 47

Sonja Fritzsche

Edited by Sonja Fritzsche, the collection contains fourteen chapters written by specialists from around the world. Film traditions represented include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States plus a chapter on digital shorts.
Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication

Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley

Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication presents concepts, experiments, collaborations, and strategies at the crossroads of the fields of scholarly communication and information literacy. The seventeen essays and interviews in this volume engage ideas and describe vital partnerships that enrich both information literacy and scholarly communication programs within institutions of higher education. Contributions address core scholarly communication topics such as open access, copyright, authors’ rights, the social and economic factors of publishing, and scholarly publishing through the lens of information literacy. This volume is appropriate for all university and college libraries and for library and information school collections.

(Please note: This record and pdf are for the Open Access edition. To purchase the print or e-book edition or to access ACRL's OA edition (with bookmarking capabilities), please visit the ALA Store.)
Contesting Identities: The Mijikenda and Their Neighbors in Kenyan Coastal Society

Rebecca Gearhart and Linda Giles

With contributions from scholars on three continents, Contested Identities fills a major gap in the history of Kenya’s coastal history by including the voices of the Mijikenda, a people whose experiences and perspectives have received less attention than the better known Swahili people.
A Conductor's Guide to Selected Baroque Choral-Orchestral Works

Jonathan D. Green

In A Conductor’s Guide to Selected Baroque Choral-Orchestral Works, Jonathan D. Green's sixth book-length contribution of guides for conductors, he offers this companion to his critically acclaimed A Conductor’s Guide to the Choral-Orchestral Works of J. S. Bach. In this volume, Green addresses works of the Baroque era from Monteverdi through Bach's contemporaries.

From Amazon.com
Amazons, Wives, Nuns, and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Brazil, 1500-1822

Carole Myscofski

The Roman Catholic church played a dominant role in colonial Brazil, so that women's lives were shaped and constrained by the Church's ideals for pure women, as well as by parallel concepts in the Iberian honor code. Records left by Jesuit missionaries, Roman Catholic church officials, and Portuguese Inquisitors make clear that women's daily lives and their opportunities for marriage, education, and religious practice were sharply circumscribed. Yet these same documents also provide evocative glimpses of the religious beliefs and practices that were especially cherished or independently developed by women for their own use. Drawing on extensive original research in primary manuscript and printed sources from Brazilian libraries and archives, as well as secondary Brazilian historical works, Carole Myscofski proposes to write Brazilian women back into history, to understand how they lived their lives within the society created by the Portuguese imperial government and Luso-Catholic ecclesiastical institutions. Myscofski offers detailed explorations of the Catholic colonial views of the ideal woman, the patterns in women's education, the religious views on marriage and sexuality, the history of women's convents and retreat houses, and the development of magical practices among women in that era. Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service.
Critical Insights: Raymond Carver

James Plath

Edited by James Plath, professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, this volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the significant and controversial writer.
Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change

Dani Snyder-Young

Much has been written about theatre's capacity to create social change. Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change, however, looks at some of the reasons why achieving such goals is hard; examining what theatre can and can't do. It critiques the limitations of theatre in the creation of social change, in order to engage in a productive discussion of theatre's strengths - and weaknesses - and theatre artists' opportunities to make change in an unjust world. This book focuses on theatre's impact on both participants and spectators, examining a wide range of contemporary applied and political theatre case studies, engaging with some of the most common forms of theatre used towards the goals of social change, including Theatre of the Oppressed, professional political theatre in performance, community-based theatre, prison theatre, and classroom drama. Theatre of Good Intentions constructs an argument advocating for artists and students to think strategically about the limitations and opportunities of theatre as a medium of social change.

Content provided by Syndetics™, a Bowker service.
Nordic Knitting Traditions: Knit 25 Scandinavian, Icelandic and Fair Isle Accessories

Susan Anderson-Freed

Traditional Scandinavian and Icelandic designs are given new life in the projects found in Nordic Knitting Traditions. 25 projects feature original floral, star, feather and geometric motifs, all knit in fresh and modern colors. With a diverse collection of hats, tams, mittens, gloves, socks, knee-highs and legwarmers, you'll find plenty of jaw-dropping, colorful accessories to knit for yourself and the ones you love.

Content Provided by Syndetics.
Racial Ambivalence in Diverse Communities: Whiteness and the Power of Color-Blind Ideologies

Meghan A. Burke

This book makes use of in-depth interviews with the residents most active in shaping the racially diverse urban communities in which they live. As most of them are white and progressive, it provides a unique view into the particular ways that color-blind ideologies work among liberals, particularly those who encounter racial diversity regularly. It reveals not just the pervasiveness of color-blind ideology and coded race talk among these residents, but also the difficulty they encounter when they try to speak or work outside of the rubric of color-blindness. This is especially vivid in their concrete discussions of the neighborhoods’ diversity and the choices they and their families make to live in and contribute to these communities. This close examination of how they wrestle with diversity in everyday life reveals the process whereby they unintentionally re-create a white habitus inside of these racially diverse communities, where despite their pro-diversity stance they still act upon and preserve comfort and privileges for whites. The book also provides a close examination of white racial identity, as the context of a diverse community provides both the catalyst and, significantly, the space for an examination of an unarticulated racial consciousness, which has implications for our study of whiteness more generally. The layers of ambivalence and pride surrounding the fact of diversity in these neighborhoods and residents’ lives reveal both limitations and hope as the nation itself becomes more diverse. This critical and yet compassionate book extends our understanding of contemporary racial ideology and racial discourse, as well as our understanding of the complexities of whiteness.