Penn State University Press: 456 books
Voting Deliberatively
FDR and the 1936 Presidential Campaign
Language: English
Release Date: May 11, 2015
The 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to hold the promise of Democratic domination for years to come. However, leading up to the 1936 election, persistent economic problems, a controversial domestic agenda, and the perception of a weak foreign policy were chipping away at public support....
by Philip Furia
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 1991
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 1991
By using his Cantos for storing, "making new," and transmitting historical documents, Pound was returning the epic to its ancient function as a tribal archive for the "luminous details" of history that define a culture's past and shape its future. So argues this book, which does...
Our Practices, Our Selves
Or, What it Means to Be Human
Language: English
Release Date: February 16, 2001
A book for everyone interested in learning how philosophy is done and what it can tell us about who we are.
Animating Empire
Automata, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World
Language: English
Release Date: March 23, 2018
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. In Animating Empire, Jessica Keating recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political...
by Diane Enns
Language: English
Release Date: March 26, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: March 26, 2012
We know that violence breeds violence. We need look no further than the wars in the western Balkans, the genocide in Rwanda, or the ongoing crisis in Israel and Palestine. But we don’t know how to deal with the messy moral and political quandaries that result when victims become perpetrators. When...
by W. Clark Gilpin
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 2014
Religion Around Emily Dickinson begins with a seeming paradox posed by Dickinson’s posthumously published works: while her poems and letters contain many explicitly religious themes and concepts, throughout her life she resisted joining her local church and rarely attended services. Prompted by...
by Tracy Adams
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: September 26, 2014
In Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, Tracy Adams offers a reevaluation of Christine de Pizan’s literary engagement with contemporary politics. Adams locates Christine’s works within a detailed narrative of the complex history of the dispute between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs,...
Five Chapters on Rhetoric
Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art
Language: English
Release Date: April 13, 2009
Michael Kochin’s radical exploration of rhetoric is built around five fundamental concepts that illuminate how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. To speak persuasively is to bring new things into existence—to create a political movement out of a crowd, or an army out of a mob.
Five...
by James Garrison
Language: English
Release Date: March 23, 1992
Language: English
Release Date: March 23, 1992
For centuries the most revered poem in the Western literary canon, Vergil's Aeneid celebrates the Roman virtue of pietas. In the preface to his English translation of the poem, John Dryden attempts to explain all that this virtue includes: "Piety alone," he writes, "comprehends the...
Mortal Gods
Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes
Language: English
Release Date: December 12, 2011
According to the commonly accepted view, Thomas Hobbes began his intellectual career as a humanist, but his discovery, in midlife, of the wonders of geometry initiated a critical transition from humanism to the scientific study of politics. In Mortal Gods, Ted Miller radically revises this view, arguing...
Plato's Dialectic at Play
Argument, Structure, and Myth in the Symposium
Language: English
Release Date: February 7, 2005
The Symposium is one of Plato’s most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, Plato’s Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation...
Translated Christianities
Nahuatl and Maya Religious Texts
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2014
Beginning in the sixteenth century, ecclesiastics and others created religious texts written in the native languages of the Nahua and Yucatec Maya. These texts played an important role in the evangelization of central Mexico and Yucatan. Translated Christianities is the first book to provide readers...
Rage and Denials
Collectivist Philosophy, Politics, and Art Historiography, 1890–1947
Language: English
Release Date: September 11, 2015
In Rage and Denials, philosopher and architectural historian Branko Mitrović examines in detail the historiography of art and architecture in the twentieth century, with a focus on the debate between the understanding of society as a set of individuals and the understanding of individuals as mere...
by Heidi C. Gearhart
Language: English
Release Date: May 2, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: May 2, 2017
In this study of the rare twelfth-century treatise On Diverse Arts, Heidi C. Gearhart explores the unique system of values that guided artists of the High Middle Ages as they created their works.
Written in northern Germany by a monk known only by the pseudonym Theophilus, On Diverse Arts is...