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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Modernist literature might well be accused of going to the dogs. From the strays wandering the streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses to the highbred canine subject of Virginia Woolf’s Flush, dogs populate a range of modernist texts. In many ways, the dog in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became ......
Heroic Subjectivity and Elect Community in Seventeenth-Century England
A study of romance, religion, and politics in seventeenth-century England, presenting a recontextualized understanding of romance as a multi-generic narrative structure or strategy rather than a prose genre.
A collection of essays focusing on the relationship between concepts of the holy and the unholy in western European medieval culture. Demonstrates how religion, magic, and science were all modes of engagement with a natural world that was understood to be divinely created and infused with mysterious ......
Although we are currently bombarded with numerous health scares—AIDS, West Nile virus, avian flu, and the recent swine flu, just to name a few that now fill our media reports and instill dread in the population—we can scarcely imagine the outlook that dominated the mindset of those who endured the bubonic plague in England during ......
Transhumanism is widely misunderstood, in part because the media has exaggerated current technologies and branded the movement as dangerous, leading many to believe that hybrid humans may soon walk among us and that immortality, achieved by means of mind-uploading, is imminent. In this essential and clarifying volume, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner ......
Coptic is the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in an alphabet derived primarily from Greek instead of hieroglyphics. It borrows some vocabulary from ancient Greek, and it was used primarily for writing Christian scriptures and treatises. There is no uniform Coptic language, but rather six major dialects.
Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa
Examines the role of religion in LGBT activism in Kenya. Offers case studies of creative forms of queer visibility through which Kenyan LGBT individuals organize and present themselves in the public domain while critically engaging and appropriating Christian beliefs, symbols, and practices.
Alexander Gardner, Photography, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America
Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War; what is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international worker’s rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s ......
The Algerian War of Independence (195462), also known as the Algerian Revolution, was a messy and vicious conflict that took place between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front. Waged primarily in Algeria, it severely traumatized citizens on both sides of the Mediterranean. In France, it is known as the war without a name, and ......
