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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Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood
The Play World chronicles the history and evolution of the concept of play as a universal part of childhood. Examining texts and toys coming out of Europe between 1631 and 1914, Patricia Anne Simpson argues that German material, literary, and pedagogical cultures were central to the construction of the modern ideas and realities of play ......
Known as “La Chièvre de Reims,” Robert de Reims was among the earliest trouvères—poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours, but who wrote their works in the northern dialects of France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and Modern French of all the songs and motets ......
An unparalleled encyclopedic collaboration between award-winning Mexican-American scholar Ilan Stavans and illustrator Eko, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary features lively and informative descriptions of forty-six religious, mythical, and ......
Field Language presents the work of an extraordinary couple who together left the rural lifeways of their Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world” to create forms of modern art that reflected on the places and culture they came from. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition devoted to the working ......
Acoustic Creatures explores the phenomenon of human and animal acoustic entanglements in art and performance practices. Focusing on the work of artists that get into the spaces between species, Austin McQuinn discovers that sounding animality secures a vital connection to the creatural.
Considered by many to be one of the fathers of early modern German Pietism, August Hermann Francke lived during a moment when an emphasis on conversion was beginning to produce small shifts in how the sacraments were defined—a harbinger of later, more dramatic changes to come in evangelical theology. In this book, Peter James Yoder uses ......
Examines the rhetorical practices that generate and sustain discrimination against disabled people. Demonstrates how ableist values, knowledge, and ways of seeing pervade Western culture and influence social institutions such as law, sport, and religion.
An interpretation of early modern Paris demonstrating that sound was as important as vision during the reign of Louis XIV. Discloses myriad ways in which sound generated an interpenetration of elite and popular culture, revealing complex acoustic dimensions of class, politics, sexuality, and punishment
Once referred to by the New York Times as the “Israeli Faulkner,” A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country ......
