The following publications are produced in conjunction with the English Department and its affiliated programs.
Contemporary Literature
Published quarterly by the University of Wisconsin Press, Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative.
Contemporary Literature published the first articles on Thomas Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo; it also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J.M. Coetzee to American readers. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, CL features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical or cultural debates.
Dictionary of American Regional English
The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is a multi-volume reference work that documents words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one place to another place across the United States. Challenging the popular notion that our language has been “homogenized” by the media and our mobile population, DARE demonstrates that there are many thousands of differences that characterize the dialect regions of the U.S.
DARE is based on face-to-face interviews carried out in all 50 states between 1965 and 1970 and on a comprehensive collection of written materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, newspapers, government documents, etc.) that cover our history from the colonial period to the present. The entries in DARE include regional pronunciations, variant forms, some etymologies, and regional and social distributions of the words and phrases.
The Madison Review
The Madison Review is an independent literary arts journal published through the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published semiannually, each issue of The Madison Review contains previously unpublished fiction, poetry, and art as well as interviews with well-known writers. Contributors to the Review have included I.B. Singer, Stephen Dunn, Lisel Mueller, May Sarton, Charles Baxter, Roberto Fernandez, and C.K. Williams. The Madison Review has also had the privilege of interviewing such literary figures as Billy Collins, Maurice Manning, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, David Sedaris, Lorrie Moore, Dean Young, Ira Glass, and Nathan Englander.
Founded in the early 1970s by students from the university’s creative writing program, The Madison Review remains a student-run journal to this day. The staff—including editors—is composed entirely of undergraduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since the staff changes frequently, each issue attempts to showcase the distinct aesthetics of that year’s reviewing panel. Professor Ron Kuka has acted as the faculty advisor for The Madison Review since 1990.