Books

Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Miriam Toews’s oeuvre and a celebration of fiction’s ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.

A comparative world-scale environmental history, Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.

Nestor Makhno has been called a revolutionary anarchist, a peasant rebel, the Ukrainian Robin Hood, a mass-murderer, a pogromist, and a devil. Through a meticulous analysis of the Makhnovist-Mennonite conflict, Sean Patterson attempts to make sense of the competing cultural memories and presents new ways of thinking about Makhno and his movement.

Part criticism, part memoir, Making Believe argues that there is no such thing as Mennonite art. At the same time, her close engagement with individual works of art paradoxically leads Redekop to identify a Mennonite sensibility at play in the space where artists from many cultures interact.

The history of the twentieth century is one of modernization, a story of old ways being left behind. Many traditionalist Mennonites rejected these changes, especially the automobile, which they regarded as a symbol of pride and individualism. They became known as a “horse-and-buggy” people.

After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America offers a cohesive platform for an interdisciplinary reappraisal of Mennonite literature and literary criticism, as well as a reflection of current conversations in the field about Mennonite literary discourse and cultural identity.

Drawing on recent work in diaspora studies, Rewriting the Break Event offers a historicization of Mennonite literary studies in Canada, followed by close readings of five novels that rewrite the Mennonite break event through specific strains of emphasis, including a religious narrative, ethnic narrative, trauma narrative, and meta-narrative.

One man, four identities, and a son's quest to reconcile the public and private lives of his Mennonite father in WWII.

Mennonite Women in Canada traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years.

In the 1870s, approximately 18,000 Mennonites migrated from present-day Ukraine to the North American grasslands. In Hidden Worlds, Royden Loewen illuminates the ways they adapted to the New World, including new concepts of social boundary and community, and new strategies of land ownership and legacy.

Wild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon.

In this pioneering book, Doreen Helen Klassen explores a collection of Mennonite Low German songs and rhymes.