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.
Scholarly publishing has faced monumental challenges over the past few decades. The Press takes its place among those institutions moving the enterprise forward. Its innovative projects continue to identify and embrace the technological advances and business models that ensure scholarly publishing will remain feasible, and widely accessible, well into the future.
Focalization in Four Eighteenth-Century French Novels
William F. Edmiston revises current theories of what narratologists call "focalization" and applies his revised theory to four eighteenth-century French memoir-novels.
Hindsight and Insight contributes to our knowledge of the history and evolution of the novel by demonstrating that France's earliest novelists were ......
Linguistic and semantic features in names-and surnames in particular-reveal evidence of historical phenomena, such as migrations, occupational structure, and acculturation. In this book, Alexander Avram assembles and analyzes a corpus of more than 28,000 surnames, including phonetic and graphic variants, used by Jews in Romanian-speaking lands ......
Examines the rhetorical function of Isaiah 28–35, a series of six woe oracles, in relation to reading the book of Isaiah as a whole. Explores the use of the language of agrarian wisdom to transport the reader from prior reflections on historical destruction into a vision of ultimate hope.
First published in Philadelphia in 1859, History of Independence Hall combines Belisle’s meditations on the hall as a sacred part of our nation’s history with biographical accounts of each signer of the Declaration of Independence and a meticulous catalogue of the contents of the hall. The author states his hope that the ......
Publisher J. S. Ogilvie's History of the Great Flood gathers many first-person accounts of the Johnstown disaster of May 1889, offering a largely sensationalized compilation of articles and interviews concerning the event. (The title's declaration of 10,000 deaths should alert readers to treat Ogilvie's facts with skepticism—the ......
An account of the Lenni Lenape and other American Indian tribes in the mid-Atlantic region by Reverend John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary based in Ohio and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. First published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1818.
Ehud Ben Zvi is one of the foremost scholars in the field of Hebrew Bible today. He has had a global impact both as a researcher and as a teacher, and he continues to create cutting-edge research that is helping to shape the future of the field. This volume marks his upcoming retirement from the University of Alberta and honors him and his ......
Visual Culture in the Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodical
Hold That Pose explores the role of visual images in Spain’s transition to a fully modern illustrated press by the first decade of the twentieth century. It examines both the ideological impact and the technological transformation of image production in Spanish magazines during the Restoration. In the brief period of forty years, ......
On Mother’s Day 2001, Henny Beaumont gave birth to her third daughter, Beth. For the first four hours of Beth’s life, she seemed no different from Henny’s two other little girls. But when the doctor told Henny and her husband that their daughter might have Down syndrome, Henny thought that her life was over. How would she be ......
