Penn State University Press: 456 books
Deepening Local Democracy in Latin America
Participation, Decentralization, and the Left
Language: English
Release Date: March 25, 2011
The resurgence of the Left in Latin America over the past decade has been so notable that it has been called “the Pink Tide.” In recent years, regimes with leftist leaders have risen to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela. What does...
From Hysteria to Hormones
A Rhetorical History
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 2018
In From Hysteria to Hormones, Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women’s health.
Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term “hormone” in 1905,...
Surveying the Avant-Garde
Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines
Language: English
Release Date: July 6, 2018
Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde.
Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?” and “What should...
Georg Trakl's Poetry
Toward a Union of Opposites
Language: English
Release Date: February 8, 1991
The chaotic mixture of elements in Trakl's poems is more apparent than real, this book argues, thus challenging the "Orphic" view of Walther Killy and his followers. A dream of unity—one of the most ancient dreams in human history—is in fact reflected in all of Trakl's work.
The...
Divining the Self
A Study in Yoruba Myth and Human Consciousness
Language: English
Release Date: November 15, 2012
Divining the Self weaves elements of personal narrative, myth, history, and interpretive analysis into a vibrant tapestry that reflects the textured, embodied, and performative nature of scripture and scripturalizing practices. Velma Love examines the Odu—the Yoruba sacred scriptures—along with...
Love Cures
Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance
Language: English
Release Date: November 3, 2009
What is love? Popular culture bombards us with notions of the intoxicating capacities of love or of beguiling women who can bewitch or heal—to the point that it is easy to believe that such images are timeless and universal. Not so, argues Laine Doggett in Love Cures. Aspects of love that are expressed...
Weaving Narrative
Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2010
Enide’s tattered dress and Erec’s fabulous coronation robe; Yvain’s nudity in the forest, which prevents maidens who know him well clothed from identifying him; Lanval’s fairy-lady parading about in the Arthurian court, scantily dressed, for all to observe: just why is clothing so important...
Posthumous America
Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: June 10, 2018
Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For writers such as John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more...
by Sarah Horowitz
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2014
In Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France, Sarah Horowitz brings together the political and cultural history of post-revolutionary France to illuminate how French society responded to and recovered from the upheaval of the French Revolution. The Revolution led to a heightened sense of...
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Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2016
This collection of essays studies the movement of texts in the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period from historical and philological perspectives. Rejecting the presumption that texts simply travel without changing, the contributors examine closely the nature of these writings, which are concerned...
Performing Animals
History, Agency, Theater
Language: English
Release Date: September 28, 2017
From bears on the Renaissance stage to the equine pageantry of the nineteenth-century hunt, animals have been used in human-orchestrated entertainments throughout history. The essays in this volume present an array of case studies that inspire new ways of interpreting animal performance and the role...
by Peter Iver Kaufman
Language: English
Release Date: November 25, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: November 25, 2013
For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historical and religious...
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Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: May 23, 2016
Often referred to as a proto-feminist, early modern English philosopher and rhetorician Mary Astell was a pious supporter of monarchy who wrote about gender equality at a time when society tightly constrained female agency. This diverse collection of essays situates her ideas in feminist, historical,...
Magic in the Cloister
Pious Motives, Illicit Interests, and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2013
During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a group of monks with occult interests donated what became a remarkable collection of more than thirty magic texts to the library of the Benedictine abbey of St. Augustine's in Canterbury. The monks collected texts that provided positive justifications...