University Of Pennsylvania Press imprint: 776 books
The Decadent Republic of Letters
Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2012
While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. In The Decadent Republic...
In Light of Another's Word
European Ethnography in the Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: November 14, 2013
Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and even xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they meant...
Conduct Becoming
Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 2017
Conduct Becoming examines a new genre of late medieval writing that focuses on a wife's virtuous conduct and ability of such conduct to alter marital and social relations in the world. Considering a range of texts written for women—the journées chrétiennes or daily guides for Christian living,...
Writing and Holiness
The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2013
Drawing on comparative literature, ritual and performance studies, and the history of asceticism, Derek Krueger explores how early Christian writers came to view writing as salvific, as worship through the production of art. Exploring the emergence of new and distinctly Christian ideas about authorship...
Measuring Up
How Advertising Affects Self-Image
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
The mute gestures of advertising images are frozen for posterity by photographers and illustrators, gestures that, for better or worse, perpetuate a certain aesthetic and eventually become emblematic of a period. The images of today display the values of a society that has more interest in the body...
Of Bondage
Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England
Language: English
Release Date: April 22, 2013
The late sixteenth-century penal debt bond, which allowed an unsatisfied creditor to seize the body of his debtor, set in motion a series of precedents that would shape the legal, philosophical, and moral issue of property-in-person in England and America for centuries. Focusing on this historical...
Looking Inward
Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England
Language: English
Release Date: February 12, 2013
"You must see yourself." The exhortation was increasingly familiar to English men and women in the two centuries before the Reformation. They encountered it repeatedly in their devotional books, the popular guides to spiritual self-improvement that were reaching an ever-growing readership...
Enchantment
On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West
Language: English
Release Date: March 19, 2012
What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, and carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have long recognized the power of individuals to lead or enchant by the force of personal charisma—and...
by Daniel Cottom
Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2013
It is widely acknowledged that the unhuman plays a significant role in the definition of humanity in contemporary thought. It appears in the thematization of "the Other" in philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and postcolonial studies, and shows up in the "antihumanism"...
Radclyffe Hall
A Life in the Writing
Language: English
Release Date: May 31, 2011
The Well of Loneliness is probably the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and certainly the most widely read. It contains no explicit sex scenes, yet in 1928, the year in which the novel was published, it was deemed obscene in a British court of law for its defense of sexual inversion and was...
The Poetics of Piracy
Emulating Spain in English Literature
Language: English
Release Date: January 9, 2013
With its dominance as a European power and the explosion of its prose and dramatic writing, Spain provided an irresistible literary source for English writers of the early modern period. But the deep and escalating political rivalry between the two nations led English writers to negotiate, disavow,...
by Peter L. Laurence
Language: English
Release Date: January 29, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: January 29, 2016
Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes,...
Inventing the New Negro
Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2013
It is no coincidence, Daphne Lamothe writes, that so many black writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century either trained formally as ethnographers or worked as amateur collectors of folklore and folk culture. In Inventing the New Negro Lamothe explores the process by which...
Not in This Family
Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America
Language: English
Release Date: February 10, 2012
Many Americans hold fast to the notion that gay men and women, more often than not, have been ostracized from disapproving families. Not in This Family challenges this myth and shows how kinship ties were an animating force in gay culture, politics, and consciousness throughout the latter half of...