Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences. The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
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Since its construction, Notre Dame Cathedral has played a central role in French cultural identity. In the wake of the tragic fire of 2019, questions of how to restore the fabric of this quintessential French monument are once more at the forefront. This all-too-prescient book, first published in French in 2013, takes a central place in the ......
What is it about puzzles that drives us to figure them out? In this unique and innovative book, Bret L. Rothstein explores how mechanical problems delight and frustrate us, distracting our attention from recognizably useful activities and directing it toward something that may be even more important.
The romantic and rebellious novelist George Sand, born in 1804 as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, remains one of France's most infamous and beloved literary figures. Thanks to a peerless translation by Gretchen van Slyke, Martine Reid's acclaimed biography of Sand is now available in English.
A collection of eleven essays on the career and texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald, focusing on the delicate balance in Fitzgerald's career between money and literary respectability.
Sumerian was the first language to be put into writing (ca. 3200-3100 BCE), and it is the language for which the cuneiform script was originally developed. Even after it was supplanted by Akkadian as the primary spoken language in ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian continued to be used as a scholarly written language until the end of the first ......
Written by preeminent Fitzgerald biographer and literary critic, Scott Donaldson, this book presents a fresh, insightful exploration of the war between the sexes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional and autobiographical writings. The volume opens with a close reading of Tender Is the Night, in which Donaldson argues that the key theme of the ......
Considers the relation of anarchist ideology to avant-garde sculpture through an examination of iconic artists and writers whose work transformed European modernism: Jacob Epstein, Oscar Wilde, Umberto Boccioni, F. T. Marinetti, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Ezra Pound.
Examines a series of linked case studies that not only highlight moments of seeming disconnect between seeing and believing, including hoaxes, miracles, spirit paintings, manipulated photographs, and holograms, but also offer a sensory history of ways of seeing.
A Sensory History Manifesto is a brief and timely meditation on the state of the field. It invites historians who are unfamiliar with sensory history to adopt some of its insights and practices, and it urges current practitioners to think in new ways about writing histories of the senses. Starting from the premise that the sensorium is a ......
