English Faculty Bookshelf

A gallery of books by faculty in the English Department, College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University.

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Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication
2018
Kristen R. Moore (Editor) and Daniel P. Richards (Editor)

This collection, aimed at scholars, teachers, and practitioners in technical communication, focuses on the praxis-based connections between technical communication and theoretical movements that have emerged in the past several decades, namely new materialism and posthumanism. It provides a much needed link between contemporary theoretical discussions about new materialisms and posthumanism and the practical, everyday work of technical communicators. The collection insists that where some theoretical perspectives fall flat for practitioners, posthumanism and new materialisms have the potential to enable more effective and comprehensive practices, methodologies, and pedagogies. [From Amazon.com]
Through an Indian's Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot
2017
Drew Lopenzina

The life of William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its "Indian question" in favor of extinction. Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess's key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess's own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity. [From Amazon.com]
Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile
2015
Farideh Goldin

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in 1979, Farideh's family was forced to flee. They arrived in Israel as refugees. Farideh's father was a well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz. During his last visit to the United States in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir that chronicled the years of his life after exile. Leaving Iran knits together his story of dislocation and loss with Farideh's own experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home. [Amazon.com]
Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction
2015
Beth L. Hewitt (Editor) and Kevin Eric DePew (Editor)

Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) addresses the questions and decisions that administrators and instructors most need to consider when developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field (members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in OWI and other experts and stakeholders), the authors, explain the foundations of the recently published (2013) "A Position Statement of Principles and Examples Effective Practices for OWI" and provide illustrative practical applications. ... The editors believe that the field of writing studies is on a trajectory in which most courses will be mediated online to various degrees; therefore the principles detailed in this collection may become the basis for future writing instruction practices. ... [Amazon.com]
Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism
2015
Joyce Hoffmann (Editor)

[This] is an anthology of stellar work by 17 seventeen great female literary and investigative reporters whose newspaper writing has garnered awards over the past quarter century. Each chapter features a bio, a selected story, and an author's afterwords prepared especially for this book. A large percentage of college and graduate school journalism students are women. Yet textbooks and resource material available is decidedly male centric. ... [This book] includes the work of women journalists who wrote for top newspapers and alternative weeklies during the golden age of newsprint journalism.
Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism
2014
Peter Adams

In 1862, in the only instance of a Jewish expulsion in America, General Ulysses S. Grant banished Jewish citizens from the region under his military command. Although the order was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, it represented growing anti-Semitism in America. Convinced that assimilation was their best defense, Jews sought to Americanize by shedding distinctive dress, occupations, and religious rituals… In Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism, Peter Adams recounts the history of the American Jewish Community’s assimilation efforts, organization, and political mobilization in the late 19th century, as political and cultural imperatives crafted a new, American brand of Judaism. [From Amazon.com]
Headhunting and Other Sports Poems
2014
Philip Raisor

Headhunting and Other Sports Poems, Philip Raisor's third collection, explores how sports enters our lives through front, back, and side doors, while we are asleep or dying, arguing, praying, or running hell-bent from memories that won't let go. Knee injuries end an athlete's career, a wife prefers the opera to a husband's hockey night, war and domestic violence haunt games played by sons, daughters, and fathers, Phil Mickelson and Wilt Chamberlain make cameo appearances, a life-long sports addict petitions for entrance to heaven. Raisor digs at the dark areas in sports experience to pry loose principles worth preserving, games worth celebrating. He honors American sport for its joy, pain, and what it says about us. [Amazon.com]
The Oxford Handbook of American Drama
2014
Jeffrey H. Richards (Editor) and Heather S. Nathans (Editor)

When one thinks of American Drama, names like Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams readily come to mind. However, as The Oxford Handbook of American Drama shows, the U.S. has a deep and varied tradition that extends back to the years before the Revolutionary War. The essays gathered here trace U.S dramatic history, ranging from plays by Mercy Otis Warren to Tony Kushner… [From Amazon.com]
Loving The L Word: The Complete Series in Focus
2013
Dana Heller (Editor)

The complete and groundbreaking The L Word is now out on DVD and this book makes the perfect companion, covering the series in its entirety. Loving The L Word picks up where Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television (I.B. Tauris, 2006) left off. With new, updated chapters by many of the same television writers and scholars who contributed to the first volume, as well as essays by some newcomers, Loving The L Word explores the series' quantum contribution to the ongoing evolution of queer television. [Amazon.com]
Hoosiers: The Poems
2013
Philip Raisor

Winner of the 2013 Palooka Press Chapbook Contest, Philip Raisor's book is fire in your hands. The war of sport. The having of dreams and the loss of them, dropped from the same hands that palm basketballs, carry rifles, attempt to erase the squiggly race lines of the '50s and '60s. He played with Wilt Chamberlain and against Oscar Robertson, but the real story here is in the flame of words, the way they burn in your stomach, in your mind, in your heart for so long after reading them. [from Palookamag.com]
Swimming in the Shallow End: Poems
2013
Philip Raisor

Swimming in the Shallow End is narrative poetry at its best, a verse memoir that examines the archetypal American conflict between the desire to stay and the passion to go. Take any community; every street, in and out, is crowded with the dreams and frustrations of characters who seek their identities on the road or in their favorite diners. In an exchange of stories between the narrator who returns like the prodigal son and his wayfaring friend, the worlds of the Bronx and Paris and Hanoi are not far from Muncie, Indiana. Like William Carlos Williams' Rutherford, New Jersey, and B.H. Fairchild's Liberal, Kansas, Philip Raisor's Middletown is a neighborhood pool that never seems long or deep enough, but grows in memory and the imagination... [Amazon.com]
Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period
2012
Drew Lopenzina

Reexamines the writings of early indigenous authors in the northeastern United States. The Native peoples of colonial New England were quick to grasp the practical functions of Western literacy. Their written literary output was composed to suit their own needs and expressed views often in resistance to the agendas of the European colonists they were confronted with. Red Ink is an engaging retelling of American colonial history, one that draws on documents that have received scant critical and scholarly attention to offer an important new interpretation grounded in indigenous contexts and perspectives. ... In a compelling narrative arc, Lopenzina enables the reader to travel through a history that, however familiar, has never been fully appreciated or understood from a Native-centered perspective. [Amazon.com]
Hairspray
2011
Dana Heller

By reconsidering assumptions about mainstream popular culture and its revolutionary possibilities, author Dana Heller reveals that John Waters' popular 1988 film "Hairspray" is the director's most subversive movie. Represents the first scholarly work on any of film director John Waters' films Incorporates original interview material with the director Reveals meanings embedded in the film's narrative treatment of racial and sexual politics. [Amazon.com]
Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters
2009
Mercy Warren Otis, Jeffery H. Richards (Editor), and Sharon M. Harris (Editor)

This volume gathers more than one hundred letters-most of them previously unpublished-written by Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814). Warren, whose works include a three-volume history of the American Revolution as well as plays and poems, was a major literary figure of her era and one of the most important American women writers of the eighteenth century. Her correspondents included Martha and George Washington, Abigail and John Adams, and Catharine Macaulay… [From Amazon.com]
Migration, Accommodation and Language Change: Language at the Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity
2008
Bridget L. Anderson

This work marries qualitative ethnographic methods to quantitative acoustic methods. The analysis describes how internal and external factors in phonological change differ and demonstrates how these two forces interact to structure the phonological systems of Appalachian and African American Southern Migrant speakers in the Detroit, Michigan area. [Amazon.com]
Once Upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood's Writings
2008
Sarah A. Appleton (Editor)

While it is often acknowledged that Margaret Atwood's novels are rife with allusions from the oral tradition of myth, legends, fables, and fairy tales, the implications of her liberal usage bear study. The essays in this volume have been written by some of the most influential Margaret Atwood scholars internationally, each exploring Atwoodâs use of primal, indeed archetypal, narratives to illuminate her fiction and poetry. These essays interact with all types of such narratives, from fairy tales and legends, to Greek, Roman, Biblical, and pagan mythologies, to contemporary processes of myth and tale creation. And, as the works in this collection demonstrate, Atwoodâs use of myths and fairy tales allows for an abundance of old, yet fresh material for contemporary readers. By reconciling, yet by also revisioning, the archetypal motifs, characters, and narratives, Atwoodâs writings present a familiar, yet unique, reading experience. [From Amazon.com]
Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible
2008
Imtiaz H. Habib

Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here for the first time Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people-whether from Africa, India or America-in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed. [Amazon.com]
On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam
2008
Joyce Hoffmann

Over three hundred women, both print and broadcast journalists, were accredited to chronicle America’s activities in Vietnam. Many of those women won esteemed prizes for their reporting, including the Pulitzer, the Overseas Press Club Award, the George Polk Award, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for History. Tragically, several lost their lives covering the war, while others were wounded or taken prisoner. In this gripping narrative, veteran journalist Joyce Hoffmann tells the important yet largely unknown story of a central group of these female journalists, including Dickey Chapelle, Gloria Emerson, Kate Webb, and others. Each has a unique and deeply compelling tale to tell, and vivid portraits of their personal lives and professional triumphs are woven into the controversial details of America’s twenty-year entanglement in Southeast Asia. [Amazon.com]
Writing Across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning
2008
Joyce Magnotto Neff and Carl Whithaus

Writing Across Distances and Disciplines addresses questions that cross borders between onsite, hybrid, and distributed learning environments, between higher education and the workplace, and between distance education and composition pedagogy. This groundbreaking volume raises critical issues, clarifies key terms, reviews history and theory, analyzes current research, reconsiders pedagogy, explores specific applications of WAC and WID in distributed environments, and considers what business and education might teach one another about writing and learning. Exploring the intersection of writing across the curriculum, composition studies, and distance learning, it provides an in-depth look at issues of importance to students, faculty, and administrators regarding the technological future of writing and learning in higher education. [From Amazon.com]
Jack Sheppard
2007
William Harrison Ainsworth, Edward H. Jacobs (Editor), and Manuela Mourão (Editor)

In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young mind, taste, and principles” as Jack Sheppard. An historical novel based on the exploits of John Sheppard, a thief who was executed in 1724, Jack Sheppard was blamed for inciting working-class crime and vagrancy for decades after its 1839 publication. ... This Broadview edition includes the original George Cruikshank illustrations, as well as a rich selection of contemporary reviews of the novel and material on the historical Jack Sheppard, Victorian urban street culture, and the novel’s popular theatrical adaptations.
Makeover Television: Realities Remodelled
2007
Dana Heller (Editor)

With the explosion of reality television onto screens and schedules worldwide, this timely and original book explores makeover tv, the ubiquitous reality format that has received little critical attention to date. Top writers and scholars take discussion of reality tv to the next level with lively examination of a wide range of contemporary makeover shows, such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Faking It, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and The Apprentice, that ultimately speak to television's own enduring ability to reinvent itself. The book is organized around the overarching argument that contemporary makeover programming provides the paradigmatic example of reality television's far-reaching prominence and mass appeal, an appeal that lies in ""powers of transformation"" or televisual performance that tries not only to capture reality but to intervene in it, with the ultimate aim of remodelling reality. They examine how makeover programming annexes the private space of the home, transforms the body through surgery and rigorous discipline, recreates aspects of social identity and consumer lifestyle, and changes ordinary persons into celebrities and celebrities into ordinary persons. [From Amazon.com]
The Great American Makeover: Television, History, Nation
2006
Dana Heller (Editor)

The Great American Makeover is a collection of essays that explore the American makeover mythos that has been recently repackaged in the form of popular makeover television programs such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Supernanny, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. [Amazon.com]
The Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion
2005
Peter Adams

In the decades before the Civil War, the miserable living conditions of New York City's lower east side nurtured the gangs of New York. This book tells the story of the Bowery Boys, one gang that emerged as part urban legend and part street fighters for the city's legions of young workers. Poverty and despair led to a gang culture that was easily politicized, especially under the leadership of Mike Walsh who led a distinct faction of the Bowery Boys that engaged in the violent, almost anarchic, politics of the city during the 1840s and 1850s. Amid the toppled ballot boxes and battles for supremacy on the streets, many New Yorkers feared Walsh's gang was at the frontline of a European-style revolution. A radical and immensely popular voice in antebellum New York, Walsh spoke in the unvarnished language of class conflict. Admired by Walt Whitman and feared by Tammany Hall, Walsh was an original, wildly unstable character who directed his aptly named Spartan Band against the economic and political elite of New York City and New England. As a labor organizer, state legislator, and even U.S. Congressman, the leader of the Bowery Boys fought for shorter working hours, the right to strike, free land for settlers on the American frontier, against child labor, and to restore dignity to the city's growing number of industrial workers. [From Amazon.com]
The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity
2005
Dana Heller (Editor)

The Selling of 9/11 argues that the marketing and commodification of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reveal the contradictory processes by which consumers in the United States (and around the world) use, communicate, and construct national identity and their sense of national belonging through cultural and symbolic goods. Contributors illuminate these processes and make important connections between myths of nation, practices of mourning, theories of trauma, and the politics of post-9/11 consumer culture. Their essays take critical stock of the role that consumer goods, media and press outlets, commercial advertising, marketers and corporate public relations have played in shaping cultural memory of a national tragedy. [Amazon.com]
Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference
2005
David Metzger and Peter Schulman